One of my first "real" jobs was as a proofreader for yellow page display ads. There was a day shift and an evening shift. I worked evenings. Management used a simple metric to evaluate performance: how many ads did a proofreader process on a shift.
While the day shift was adept at reading a lot of ads quickly, they had a bad habit of noticing only one mistake in an ad. So it would go back to Linotype, printing, the artist for waxing and placement (this was before desktop publishing) and then to proofreading again. That's when we'd find the other two mistakes in the ad. And send it back again.
Management chose not to measure the inefficiency caused by the sloppy first proofreading of an ad. Instead, they'd rag on us second shift readers for not being as fast as our day shift counterparts.
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8 comments:
Ruth Anne Adams summed it up quite nicely. It's a serious problem in evaluating performance.
Managers recognize and reward "face time." Are you still in the office at 9:00 p.m.? You must be an excellent employee!
On the other hand, if you have done twice as much work as your late staying colleagues but you are done by 4:30, you are a slacker.
Very problematic.
One of my first "real" jobs was as a proofreader for yellow page display ads. There was a day shift and an evening shift. I worked evenings. Management used a simple metric to evaluate performance: how many ads did a proofreader process on a shift.
While the day shift was adept at reading a lot of ads quickly, they had a bad habit of noticing only one mistake in an ad. So it would go back to Linotype, printing, the artist for waxing and placement (this was before desktop publishing) and then to proofreading again. That's when we'd find the other two mistakes in the ad. And send it back again.
Management chose not to measure the inefficiency caused by the sloppy first proofreading of an ad. Instead, they'd rag on us second shift readers for not being as fast as our day shift counterparts.
I got my revenge. Sweet revenge. But that's a story for another day.
Another nice diagram by Bradley.
If Bradley built patios for a living and studied the sociology of Christianity as a hobby he wouldn't need charts to measure his productivity.
Is "looking busy" a form of lying? Is it immoral? I think it is.
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