colette

Let Me See Your Dance

from 2019

Congratulations!

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