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Pointless Conversations

30 August, 2018 by James Lawther 1 Comment

Management meetings Do you ever lose the will to live in management meetings?  Sometimes they are so bad I want to scoop out my eyeballs with a tea-spoon.  I’d do anything to get out of the conversation. I hate futile meetings that are a waste of everybody’s time — usually highly paid people’s time. Here […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: bureaucracy, command and control, cost saving, diversity, effective meetings, employee performance measures, forced fun, key performance indicators, management style, motivation, objective setting, office productivity, performance management, targets, waste, wasted intellect

Performance Appraisals Drive Mediocrity

30 July, 2018 by James Lawther 9 Comments

Play to your strengths

It is mid-year If you work in the corporate world that means you have been busy writing appraisals.  If you have never seen one, the standard corporate appraisal form has about 5 sections: Progress Against Objectives — what you did Fit with Competency Framework — how you did it Core Strengths — things you did […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: average, best practice, collaboration, employee performance measures, performance management, sacred cows, wasted intellect

What Is the Score?

12 March, 2018 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Shattered

The bully A while back I watched an internal audit.  I saw an Area Director evaluate his Ops Supervisor. The results were, how can I best put it? Poor… Out of a possible 20 audit points the area scored 3. The boss went ballistic.  He took his subordinate aside and destroyed her.  He told her […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: auditors, command and control, continuous improvement, employee performance measures, management style, motivation

What Gets Rewarded Gets Done

26 November, 2015 by Bernie Smith 1 Comment

The walk I have always thought sheep dogs were intelligent. I didn’t realise, until recently, that they are smarter than me. I was walking with Kate — a friend of mine. Her sheep dog, a Border Collie called Harvey, was with us. After 10 miles or so Harvey seemed to be flagging. He stopped at […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: employee performance measures, measurement, targets

Are You Difficult to Work For?

13 November, 2015 by Annette Franz (Gleneicki) 3 Comments

Customer effort There’s a lot of talk about how much effort a customer is required to put forth to complete some task with an organization. Whether it’s to buy a product, to get an issue resolved, or to do something else. There’s even a way to measure this effort, using the customer effort score. If […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: bureaucracy, customer effort, employee performance measures, management style, waste

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