In a system of trust the key benefits are better products, happier employees who have less sick days and stick around longer, more creativity and new solutions that are appreciated by the community. The downside is that some employees, managers or contractors are going to take advantage of the trust in such a terrible way that you'll have no option but to swing towards control once the media finds out. A good example from my country is a decade back, when we had a lot of trust in our public sector and an elderly care facility was saving money by putting dirty diapers back on the elderly if the urine in the diapers didn't weigh enough. Crazy, right? But that's the stuff that happens with trust, you'll also see managers contracting out procurement contracts to companies they own themselves and other stuff like that.
On the opposite side you have the MBA based approach where everything is streamlined, measured and conformed. This is where you can build two hospitals for the price of 1,2 because the plan for them are exactly the same. It's where you LEAN every single business process up, and harvest the benefits. It's efficient, clean, and it slowly exhumes your business of value. Because the MBA approach very rarely manages to create something new, it's just really great at maximizing your current system. Eventually a neighboring city is going to do something wild, like figure out how to completely wipe out dyslexia by trying some crazy new method, because they trusted some hippie teacher with a plan. This is where you're forced to swing back toward trust and value tradeskills (not sure if this is the right word in English) because your politicians can't survive another period of having the highest dyslexia numbers in the country and nothing in the MBA playbook can help them.
This is a little simplified of course, and I'm certain things are different in the private sector, but I dare say, that if your organisation sticks around for long enough, it's bound to see the pendulum swing between those two outlines.
They're also insisted upon by courts to adjudicate wrongful termination cases as well as discrimination cases.
My elite 10 person team was doing a great job on Device A, while Device B had a team of 200 semi-skilled foreign contractors just barely keeping things on track. Then, somehow, the company decided to reorg my super-skilled team and promoted the leader of the contractor team.
From 3-4 levels up in the company, the Device A team and the Device B team were IDENTICAL. They were both delivering things on time and under budget, even though team A was costing the company 1/5th as much, they were both fine. These products were generating hundreds of millions of dollars or maybe even billions in revenue per year, so the difference $5 million/year and $25 million was irrelevant.
If I'd realized this sooner, I wouldn't have put so much effort into doing a great job at the expense of my own interests, and it would've been just fine
The way I perceive work is very helpful in this regard. To me, the purpose of work is to maximize my income/lifestyle while not dipping below a lower bound threshold of misery. I don't seek personal or emotional fulfillment from work at all. I did that when I was younger and, for me, it was a bad way to approach life. This way I'm much happier and my focus/attention is more on the kinds of things I hope will wind up in my obit: family, relationships, charity, etc.
I wonder if sales people ever write articles about how they're at the "mercy" of their sales metrics. The idea of it seems hilarious.
Thankfully I haven't had to deal with any metrics like this for more than a couple of months at a time.. Since engineers' specialty is to optimize ratings, it's an obvious-enough waste of time to apply them that they're usually short-lived.
This is a case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism.
We must do something
This is something
Therefore, we must do this.See also: Don't just do something, stand there!
I have seen no evidence that "hard numbers" work (they aren't "hard"...there is usually almost no justification for a particular metric). And it feeds on innumerable human biases (inability to confront uncertainty, using "hard" information to justify an emotional conclusion, creating meaningless targets, etc.).
In my experience, the practical issue is two-fold: one, people are just going to do what they do anyway but they ignore warnings signs/are more unflexible and two, you optimise for data that is obvious, collectable, and (usually) completely irrelevant.
This is a trend, it will pass as all these trends do. It started off as quite a good idea (businesses were often failing to set targets or quantify success/failure) and has just got totally out of control.
I think it may also be useful to talk about the reliability and validity of all the things that are measured.
Also, how useful is this stuff among the different fields? The article talks about gig workers and manufacturers. Would be interesting if these metrics were applied rigorously to other fields like politicians, talk show pundits, and forecasters.
Higher classes get a title, which is a one off rubber stamp of quality and then will never again be judged on performance standing alone. Dr. Senior. Dipl. Ing.
Except by there peers, who will lower a silk of omerta over "internal" affairs like a lack of quality in work.
Of course, between these professions, there are meta-power struggles, which will play out, in a court- stylized fashion, a eternal ritualized war between castes like "management" and "technical execution".
Metrics, as demanded by one caste, are worthless, as they rely on a working interface provided by the oppossition or in depth knowledge, making a allegiance two too factions necessary.
Thus all that remains of them is a ritualized insistence, to compensate for the creeping feeling of a lack of controll. For those who need them, can not get them and be certain they are accurate. Making metrics, actually - a flag of truce.
Maybe you really do have a formula that outperforms a panel of subject matter experts. It does happen sometimes. Not for long, because the experts start using it. But the bar for making this kind of claim is, at minimum, peer-reviewed experimental results that reproduce.
Human experience is a rich dataset. Intuition is a sophisticated machine. It blows my mind that people will so easily dismiss all of that in favor of a few bits of information and some 3rd grade arithmetic they just made up.
It's not scientifically rigorous just because there's a table and a graph. Come on!
A machine in which the parts of are made up of humans with 'feelings'. Distilling human beings down to cogs in a machine is bad enough when it comes from executives. This belief that corporations are some kind of non-human machine like entity is part of why the world's so fucked today.
Maybe the world would be a better place if corporations weren't run as inhuman machines with no care or regard to their employees or the world in which they operate.
What point in history are you arguing was less fucked than it is today?
Goodhart's law suggests that this is impossible.
I had a professor who was a terrible lecturer, and he knew his student evaluations were terrible every time. As he handed out the evaluations he would tell us that he did not read them, and did not care what we wrote.
I graduated twenty years ago, but just checked the department's website. He's still employed!
At my university, the law school was top-notch (at least, it is the best in the country) and it got the lowest score by far every year. Why? High expectations, huge number of students competing hard. The best school? Theology. Why? Low expectations, not many students in a far less competitive environment (And I studied in both and in probably four or five faculties across the school...Law was the best, Theology the worst...not even close, the former had people from Law firms, you got full feedback on everything...the latter, you usually got no feedback on any work).
This is really the point...now, you can do some kind of grouped mean model or you can compare over time...but what is the actual point? The reason they do this (or did this at my uni) was to compare departments/courses...but everyone knew it was bullshit...people lost jobs (I actually met the Dean who masterminded this, he came from the private sector, taught a minor course in the business school, and was utterly clueless).
The usual argument that has been given in favour of evaluations is to show a correlation with final exam scores. The two problems being (1) small samples and (2) soft-ball exams leading to higher evaluation scores.
Humans are not able to accurately evaluate their own learning. When we experience fluency or are entertained, we substitute those attributes for the attribute of ability to recognise or recall information.
It is a matter of the push and pull of scale advantages at varied sizes essentially which is essentially universal but varies by domain.