How Do Brains Like This Make It Into Upper Management?

I can’t count the number of times my team, my department, and I have butted heads with upper management because they have no idea what the work entails, what it’s like to deal with customers, or even what we do.

One time, upper management’s bright idea for increasing productivity and getting the backlog cleared was not hiring more people — which we sorely needed — or anything else we told them would help. No, it was to decrease the time allowed for certain tasks.

Each time you did a task, it got logged. Tasks had a set amount of time assigned to them. Productivity was measured by the tasks logged versus how long you were there. So, say a task was normally assigned ten minutes; they wanted it done in five. You had to somehow get twice as many of those tasks in. They did not change anything about the process. They did not improve or streamline anything. They just decided they were giving us too much time to do the tasks and that’s what was causing the backlog.

When we protested, they told us:

Management: “We don’t want to hear, ‘It takes longer to do that task!’ That’s how long you’ve been given. Do it in that time.”

As you can imagine, this did not magically fix anything.

Times were based on the average amount of time it took to do that task — including things out of our control like how long it took the system to process things or move to different systems to process different parts of the tasks.

The most seasoned high-performing veterans could shave some time off, but not as much as the new targets. There was no hope for the average of even new workers.