[KyleJune]

If you create a financial incentive for a behavior, you're telling your employees you want to see that behavior. If it was a problem and KPIs work, they should have changed them to make them align more with the business needs.

[bonoboTP]

> If you create a financial incentive for a behavior, you're telling your employees you want to see that behavior.

And it's not just individual people modifying their behavior to game things, but more of an evolutionary process that the people who tend towards gaming things will get better bonuses, better reviews, better CVs, hence better next jobs, in perpetuity.

"Don't game it" can't be a simple solution. If there are people who game things, and they accumulate rewards for it, you will just see them out compete the nongamers. You are basically telling people to sacrifice their and their family's financial position for the sake of the corporation.

Everything can and will be gamed. But at the same time if many game it, managers will really want to see evidence of nongaming, so employees are also incentivized to signal their honesty, but this must be given some kind of channel too. If managers myopically focus on gameable metrics, then their loss. You must alwas leave a door open for receiving honesty signals through some kinds of side channels. These must always be somewhat amorphous because the moment you define them, they become gameable.

In other words, no recipe, stay alert, try to cooperate but don't be a pushover, etc.

[itsoktocry]

>If you create a financial incentive for a behavior, you're telling your employees you want to see that behavior.

What a cop-out. Everyone should want the company to succeed. So why not say "Hey, boss, this KPI won't work, here's what might happen..." instead of literally working less than needed to prove some point? It's dishonest.

[shortrounddev2]

> Everyone should want the company to succeed

The company has no interest in my success, why should I care if the company succeeds? It has no effect on me if it does.

"That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired"

- Office Space

[mitthrowaway2]

Keep in mind, the context of this discussion is that someone who works really hard and completes 90% of their KPIs ahead of schedule will now be financially penalized by the CEO for reporting any additional progress.

[KyleJune]

If you want employees to prioritize the companies success over a metric, you should make yours and their interests align. Employees may fear pushing back against bad metrics because it might make them look bad saying they can't meet them or that they think they know better than their boss.

[makeitdouble]

You could turn this around and ask why iterations after iterations the company didn't understand that the KPIs were not ideal and employees not happy with it ?

Put yourself in the same boat: if you had a team to manage, with the freedom to give them incentives, and they didn't have the effect you expected, you should be able to notice it and try something else.

That's great if the team is helpful and tells you exactly what's wrong, but you should also be able to evaluate how it's going and react accordingly, otherwise you're just asleep at the wheel.

[smif]

I feel like that's where most people probably start, and then get some response like "we can't change the KPI's because blah blah" or get the runaround. Once you have established that you have no agency to change the system is when you are sort of incentivized to let it fail in hopes that a better system replaces it one day. You also don't wanna piss too many people off that may be invested in the current system because you want those references for your next job.

[Eisenstein]

When corporations have a duty to their employees and not to the shareholders, then that is when the employees will start to care about the company. As it is, you are asking for a one-way-street. Companies will hire and lay people off as economic tides turn, but then you say that the workers owe loyalty? I don't think so.