Hey associates! Grab a copy of the latest HBR on metrics management and throw it on your managers desk! Then say, can you explain this to me? Wanna get a good laugh? Watch em dance! Told em long ago, they didn't listen. Oh well! Close the barn door cause the horse got out!
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Here's a good one. The SEC is now investigating metrics management accounting functions. DOH! Bout time someone looks into beancounters. Let's see. SEC — securities and financial products? Just saying...
In fact they tried to set up shop in India a couple years ago to take advantage of lower salaries there and failed miserably.
The executives don’t care. They would run this sweatshop in India or the Philippines where this way of operating is the norm if our customers would let them get away with it.
@dz2e - Thank you for referring us to this truly interesting and informative article which clearly mirrors the way we handle claims. I encourage everyone reading your post to read the article in the Harvard Business Review that you referenced. I sincerely hope our Executives read this article, before it is too late for our company. Again, thank you.
Wow. I read and listened to this article, twice. It really hits the nail on the head. I have been trying to make this exact point to my supervisor since the implementation and push of impossible metrics. I'm pretty sure he gets it, but his hands are tied. Someone forward this article to MT stat!
As a long time claims adjuster with State Farm, I no longer consider settling claims and taking care of customers to be my job. My primary job is to meet whatever metric corporate has determined is important at the time. I am only there to get numbers because that is what is rewarded. I feel sorry for the customer who’s claim takes more than the 20 minutes I am allowed to handle it because I will be forced to cut corners in order to meet that metric. We are cheating our customers just as badly as Wells Fargo was.
The end of the article Don’t Let Metrics Undermine Your Business
https://hbr.org/2019/09/dont-let-metrics-undermine-your-business
CONCLUSION
Many managers learn the hard way that surrogation can spoil strategy, and if you don’t take action to protect against it, it’s very likely that sooner or later personal experience will lead you to the same realization. If you’re using performance metrics, surrogation is probably already happening—the mere presence of a metric, even absent any compensation, is enough to induce some level of the behavior. So it’s time to take a hard look internally to see which metrics might be most prone to surrogation and consider where it might cause the most damage. As the Wells Fargo case illustrates, preventing the disease is far preferable to treating its symptoms.
Good article. Need to read it all the way to the end though...
Put it in their face and make them explain!
Their contract and consulting companies and third party affiliates sell all this stuff (It’s not just metrics. It’s the system integrations and Third Party “partnerships”. Exchange of money.
THEY WILL NEVER ADMIT THEY WERE WRONG, when it comes to the metrics. That article was a good read. Metrics is destroying the company and employee morale, but they don't care, and they will never admit they were wrong, even though there is plenty of evidence that their metrics are NOT resulting in quality claim handling and customer satisfaction.
The mental tendency to replace strategy with metrics can destroy company value. And the metrics have done that.
Surrogation is a psychological phenomenon in which the measure(s) of a construct of interest evolve to replace the construct itself. Research on performance measurement in management accounting has identified surrogation as "the tendency for managers to lose sight of the strategic construct(s) the [performance] measures are intended to represent, and subsequently act as though the measures are the constructs of interest" (emphasis in original).[1] An everyday example of surrogation is a manager tasked with increasing customer satisfaction who begins to believe that the customer satisfaction survey score actually is customer satisfaction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogation
THEY WILL NEVER ADMIT THEY WERE WRONG.
They dont know how to read.....