Subjective Employee Productivity

When I was younger I worked as a clerk at a grocery store. It was my job, along with several other people, to keep the shelves stocked all day while the customers were shopping. Every day there was a list of tasks.

If you finished the task, you would cross off the task you completed and write your name by it. In a way it was like a makeshift employee productivity survey. I was usually scheduled with this other employee named Greg.

Greg hated his job, so he used to hide in the bulk foods section and call people on his cell phone while eating from the bulk food bags. Needless to say, the list of who completed the day’s tasks would be filled with my name. One day I was called to the office by the store manager.

He sat me down and told me he wanted to talk to me about my performance. He told me that I wasn’t doing my job as well as he would have liked, and said that I moved too slowly and was not completing the amount of work he expected. He told me that if I didn’t shape up, he might have to let me go.

I was pretty hurt. I had completed every task on the list, and often worked on other tasks in between. As I was leaving the office, he told me to get Greg.

Greg went up and had his meeting while I worked feverishly the rest of the day and tried not to be hurt. Greg and I took lunch at the same time. I told him what the store manager said and asked him what his meeting was like.

Greg responded: “Oh… man, sorry to hear that. He actually offered me a raise and told me that I’m getting a recommendation at the front office.”

For all types of assessments – employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, performance measurements, etc., it’s important to try to take your subjective analysis out of the picture. Had the store manager simply looked at the list that they created, they would have seen a relatively unbiased analysis of who completed most of the work. Instead, they simply used their eyes to figure out who brought the most value, and in doing so rewarded someone that wasn’t earning it.

Greg was fired one month after I left the job because he wasn’t doing his share. The entire situation could have been easily avoided by simply using an objective measurement system.