KPIs

Key Performance Indicators, of course. The idea is that you can measure an employee's worth through one particular aspect of their job. Whether that aspect of their job takes up all their time or just a fraction of it, all decisions about this employee should be based on this one figure. Most pertinently, their salary. They may do twenty things well, but if they do this KEY aspect of their job wrong they'll probably get fired. So what do you do? Well fuck everything else, obviously. Get your KPI right.

Sometimes a KPI might be dependent on something else. No, wait. It's always dependent on something else. It doesn't vary solely according to the performance of the employee, so you can't actually measure a person's worth through it. Here's an example:

Back in the day, over in China, Mao Tse Tsung measured the growth of the economy according to a few Key Performance Indicators, one of which was steel production. The thing with steel production is that it's dependent on how much iron ore you have at your disposal. If you don't have any, you can't make steel. It's not your fault.

However, because this indicator was Key, with an upper-case K, steel mill workers hit upon an ingenious solution. They would simply use old steel as their raw material instead of iron ore. In fact, sometimes it wasn't even that old. Whisper it, but sometimes it was new. They were effectively achieving nothing as they were repeatedly melting down the same metal over and over again, yet their 'production' was through the roof.

This is what happens when you don't trust people to do their jobs and instead keep tabs on them with a flawed system. People are cleverer than you give them credit for and people who devise these monitoring systems are nowhere near as clever as they give themselves credit for.