Keep Pushing Those KPIs And Push Your Employees Right Out The Door

This story came from five years ago when I worked for a small IT Managed Service Provider company. We had four full-time techs. The “newest” tech had about five years of experience, and I was the most seasoned tech with nearly fifteen years of experience. Between the four of us, we managed about a thousand PCs and about twenty servers spread out over about thirty clients.

None of us were assigned to a specific client; we would all take turns grabbing whatever tickets came in. All of our work was lump sum or contract work, so we never had to worry about how long a problem took to fix or how much it would cost the client. We had an Account Manager who handled all the billing and things with the clients. It was a dream job for a tech; we got to show up and do our jobs and not have to deal with sales or billing any other client drama.

I not only had the most experience but was also the most self-motivated. I would often come in early and get started on the tickets that came in after hours, and I would assist the other techs if they came across a complex problem. Everyone, including the owner, referred to me as the “Senior Tech,” even though that wasn’t my title.

After two years working there, I decided to talk to the owner about a raise. I brought all kinds of information to our meeting, showing that I closed the most tickets and received the most positive feedback from a survey we sent our clients.

Owner: “All right, I’ll give you a raise, but I need to think about how much to give you. I’ll get back to you.”

A few weeks later, he called a company meeting and announced that he had decided to change some things and that he would no longer be giving anyone raises. Instead, he would set up KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), and the entire tech team would receive weekly bonuses based on hitting those numbers. I didn’t like this at all, as it meant my pay was dependent on the performance of everyone on the team and not just me. I found out later that one of the other techs had also asked for a raise, so this was the owner’s solution to pay us less.

The KPIs were simple enough. If a ticket came in, we had to acknowledge it within fifteen minutes to achieve a score of 100. If we missed the fifteen-minute window, the score for that ticket was zero. There were a total of ten things we had to hit, including how long the ticket was open before we marked it as complete. If the total score for the week was above ninety, we each received a $100 bonus.

I saw major problems with this bonus system, and I shared my concerns with the owner. He got very annoyed with me.

Owner: “Just hit the KPIs!”

Cue malicious compliance.

We all figured out pretty quickly how to game the KPI system. We could acknowledge a ticket in the system, but it didn’t check if we had actually called the client. We would just email and mark the ticket as “Reached out to the client.” A big issue was that sometimes a client would put in a low-priority ticket and ask that we schedule it for some time the following week, but that would make us miss our KPI. So, we would start hounding the client to schedule it sooner, and if they were not available, we would simply close the ticket.

We quickly learned to hit our KPIs and start getting a bonus every week. However, it caused our customer service to drop, which is exactly what I had warned the owner about. During the previous two years, we had never had a complaint about our service, but now there were multiple complaints every week. This whole process added a ton of stress to us, as we all started to fight when someone missed a KPI, and we all started to work late on Fridays to try and get in those last few numbers.

After two months, the owner finally realized he had made a mistake. He removed the bonus system (without giving us a raise) and asked us to go back to how things were. At this point, I was so stressed that I had already started looking for another job, and we had lost two clients. I was the first to put in my two weeks’ notice, but before I left, the other three techs had all put in notice, as well.

The last I heard, the company had lost over half its clients and the owner had to bring in several new techs, paying them over 20% more than I had asked for my raise.