Comment by winwang
1 month ago
With my minor dabbling in game theory, I've considered funny angles like secret-ish internal metrics and punish those who simply game the incentives. Example: bot detections and banwaves in MMOs. Instead of instantly banning plausible bots, the company has to hide its (ever-changing) internal algo and ban in waves instead.
Basically, treating (non-)productivity like bot detection, lol.
A few years ago we started tracking both office attendance and PR count. Management swore up and down that they understood the nuances, and these metrics would only be used to follow up on outliers.
But then one middle manager sets a target. His peers, not to be outdone, set more ambitious targets. And their underlings follow up aggressively with whomever is below target. For a few months there was an implicit "no vacations" policy in much of the company, until they updated the attendance dashboard to account for PTO. And now an engineer's position in the stack rank is presumed to be her position in the PR count rank barring very strong evidence to the contrary.
The approach you outline is probably optimal, but I don't think middle management as a culture would be capable of pulling it off. You give them a KPI in a dashboard, they're going to compete on it, in a very open and simple way. Metrics are hard to argue with, and nuance requires constant vigilance to maintain.