i think a lot about how every fast food drive-thru in the country has been gaming the metrics for 10 years by asking every customer to pull forward so the order timer stops. corporate has to know it's going on, unless this is the most effective "snitches get stitches" campaign in history, which to be fair I can believe and respect
fuck metrics, if you want to know if people are working you can come out and fucking watch. if you don't trust your employees it's because you know you're not paying them enough and never any other reason
every time i see a big scary red timer hanging over the drive-thru window at a restaurant i make sure to be extra nice to the people behind the counter
Everywhere I've ever worked that had aggressive metrics — basically, everywhere I've ever worked, sooner or later — has had things in common. Namely:
- the metrics were 100% clear-cut useless as a genuine measure of literally anything (except "metrics implemented" for some manager somewhere)
- policing the metrics directly drove perverse incentives on staff behaviour
- gaming the metrics started, not "as soon as people figured out how", but simultaneously as the metrics rolled out. Because the gaming was designed and deployed via, effectively, a shadow policy hierarchy enacted by exactly the same managers designing and deploying the metrics at every level
- because if the metrics were actually for anything they claim to be for, they'd indict a whole lot of shit managers. Managers, however, have class solidarity
- metrics are unachievable ludicrous bullshit by design, because they thereby engineer the above race-to-the-bottom in workplace conduct and conditions, corruption, and employee-destroying immiseration, but in a way whereby all the (awful, glaringly obvious) visible results can be, whenever it's necessary to be seen to do something, constructed as a sackable offence committed by any given frontline worker management don't like
Man I fucking hate metrics, or "Key Performance Indicators" as they've been called in my previous jobs. Because of KPIs I've had to
- Lie to customers to sell bullshit £1 screwdrivers because of a KPI called multisales where if you sell just the item the customer wants (even if it's a £800 part with 60% margin) then that's regarded as a bad thing
- Collect the mailing data of people who were already getting our spam, reaching a point where someone once got 5 copies of our summer sales leaflet
- Being super uncooperative with refunds because if you returned something it counted as a negative transaction on your scores, tanking your average sale value for the day
- Actively encouraging people not to spend money when they would say "actually, i will have those batteries you just offered me" because I didn't want to have 2 seperate low value, non-multisaled transactions
- Intentionally log multiple bugs for functionally the same issue to pad my numbers, despite the fact this is actively worse for the developers
- Use holiday allowance for doctors appiontments because they were regarded as sick days by the system and I had been told off for time off ill
- actually on that last point I got a discipliary for going over the usual allowance for sick days despite the fact I had been doing 12hr 6 day weeks for most of the past 12 months (crunch sucks yo) and at no point did they consider that this may have a toll on the mental and physical wellbeing of the staff
- Slacking on my buddying/onboarding/training of a new employee because the company were still on my ass about KPIs and time spent training wasn't time spent doing bug entry and revisions
Also, Maplin were really sloppy with their metrics. The stick they were trying to beat me with about Margins, Average sale, Multisales, P&C sales.... all of that shit... also showed my Year to Date figures. Let me tell you, seeing that your gross YTD being deadass £300,000, with a margin of 54% (i.e. how much revenue was made after stock price and logistics) fucking radicalised me man. I was earning £11k a year back then. Knowing that I generated over £150,000 for the company and saw less than 1/10th of that myself... and seeing the regional manager on 5 times my salary turn up in his company bmw X5 twice a month to play peggle in the managers office aaaaand seeing that the company still went bust 2 years afterwards...
It just made me see the absurdity of it all. You look at a company like that and see that it's losing all of its money to exec paycheques and loan repayments and just go... why tho. The stores made money hand over fist. Literally was the monthly finances '£12000 on Robux' "help me my family are starving" meme