When Companies Ignore the Statistics

Often when I prepare stories to share about employee satisfaction, it is almost always a story of a manager or coworker that is terrible at their job that for some reason seems to be rewarded by upper management as though they are good at their roles. Employee satisfaction, in many ways, is specifically designed to uncover these employees. When employee satisfaction is low, the hope is that companies will uncover the root of the problem (the manager or coworker that is making everyone else miserable) and do something about it.

But as we also know, this is still rarely the case. Upper management has a tendency to assume their opinion of various employees is correct, and rarely take action against the managers that are upsetting most employees. They ignore the statistics in favor of the way things usually are.

The managers that are ruining it for everyone else get to keep their jobs, despite their subpar leadership and results.

This type of situation reminds me of umpiring in baseball. Umpires have been a part of baseball for generations. Calling balls and strikes, fair and foul, safe or out – this role has been in the hands of umpires since the beginning of baseball, and while errors occurred on occasion, it was widely believed that umpires were a great way to enforce the rules of baseball.

Then Pitch F/X happened. Pitch F/X is a measurement system that uses a series of cameras to judge whether or not the ball is in the strike zone. Pitch F/X is accurate to within 2 inches, and keeps track of every call an umpire makes.

One of the first things it discovered is that umpires are wrong, and they’re wrong a lot. Studies put the estimated number of pitches the umpire calls wrong at somewhere between 5 to 10 (about 5% of all pitches in a game a lot when you consider that some balls and strikes are incredibly obvious) and the number of safe/out calls wrong at 20%. Technology has proven that even the best umpires make mistakes a lot, and the worst umpires are downright abysmal.

It was once believed that umpires were rarely wrong, and although there were a few umpires that were known to be somewhat terrible, the rest were believed to be pretty good. Now, with slow motion replay and Pitch F/X, it’s been shown that even the best umpires aren’t great at their jobs. It’s not their fault – it’s human error – but the stats show that changes need to be made.

Unfortunately, this has been met with serious resistance that will be discussed in the next article. Related Blog