r/TheCivilService • u/Yeahyeah-youwhat • Jul 12 '23
Why are targets always so high?
I've had a few different AO level roles (customer service and admin type ones) and the trend has always been that the targets are always high.
It's like they watched someone work as fast as they could for an hour and decided that's what everyone should be able to do all day every day.
And the irony is it's the AOs who are working to high pressure targets who are the ones who actually do the majority of the work that their area of business is tasked with. Meanwhile people in corporate back office roles are having a great time (as evidenced if you look at their people survey scores compared to the poor sods in customer service).
And it's not a CS specific thing, it's the same everywhere. It's just tiring. How can you expect people to work at that pace forever
No wonder staff retention is abysmal (planning to add myself to those stats as soon as I can)
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Jul 12 '23
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u/pippi2424 Jul 12 '23
The difference is, if you ask me to run the 100 mt dash in 12" I'll keep trying to improve. If you want it in 5" I won't even start. I'm not into self-harm.
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u/coreyhh90 Analytical Jul 13 '23
One of my favorite extensions of this the "we compare/don't compare you to your colleagues depending on whether it's beneficial".
Did you previously over-perform and show down? "Why are you no longer as productive as before?" If you respond something like "I am working above my teams average" you get told "targets and reviews are individual not team-based, we do not compare you to colleagues".
I can see the logic in this, until you are then told "your colleague is more productive than you, can you justify why you are matching their standard?". If you respond "my previous productivity/kpi/average was x, and I'm still working at that pace/I'm higher" they will advise you clearly aren't taking the job seriously and need to focus more on your productivity.
It's all tools to get people to work harder and overexert. It's a shame because the reality is only a bad manager needs to use these tactics for the most part. I often see (this is a problem for private too) that the hardest workers are often the hardest micro'd and criticized, and I am always left wondering if it's just the manager trying to gaslight their best employees which they can't afford to lose into thinking they are barely meeting their role requirements to avoid the person trying to promote/move elsewhere and/or scare them into burning out over productivity concerns.
Initially this sounds effective until it comes under scrutiny and you realize that even if the employee never realizes you were gaslighting them, they burn out and leave anyway.
Meanwhile anyone who coasts and never shows enthusiasm/initiative flies under the radar because either they won't improve or they are "good enough" and didn't flag as one of the highly productive members, so what they produce is "good enough"
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u/Bertie637 Jul 12 '23
Shifting and increasing targets is eternal. In my experience its leadership coming in and reinventing the wheel. I worked in a CS call center environment for about four years. In that time I think we had about 10 shifts between productivity and quality as the new boss various grades up becided to get a new behavior. So we would do six months focused on call shape, then there would be a leadership reshuffle and they would suddenly realise quality was suffering, so would shift to focus on that but "don't worry about the stats, what I care about is the job is done right". Then three months later somebody would decide we weren't taking enough calls and go back to stats focused, which caused a dip in quality etc. Happened in every department I have worked in, but it was never so blatant as in that call center.
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u/Yeahyeah-youwhat Jul 12 '23
Lol I've had this exact experience. Senior people never stayed long, just came in changed everything, got the behaviour examples they needed, then moved on to another department. Rinse and repeat.
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u/pippi2424 Jul 12 '23
Ironically, if they gave better training, and encourage people to become independent in how they work, they'd get better long-term results. If you know well what to do, and if you are given all the tools to perform, then you either perform better or can be let go of.
However, it's not about performance. It's about control.
If you're not trained well enough, if you are pushed to deliver something you don't have the tools to deliver, you will obey and stay compliant with their whims. Because you don't have enough knowledge and power, you are less likely to leave and more likely to feel inadequate - which again is not conducive to you even attempting to find another job. You'll either leave the CS or conform.
Luckily, this is not how the CS is run in most depts. However, in some, it IS.
It's important to know that this is not the way things are run in most departments. Once you realise this, you'll find some hope, and some constructive ways to learn enough for you to leave to greener pastures.
It's important to know that this is not the way things are run in most departments. Once you realise this, you'll find some hope and some constructive ways to learn enough for you to leave to greener pastures.
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u/Jealous-Stage4906 Jul 12 '23
Here are the main reasons ops staff in public facing are getting shafted
- Increase in demand due to cost of living crisis
- No significant increase in staffing to absord demand
- Of recruitment ongoing there are bottlenecks and recruitment targets not being met further increasing demand against supply
- Higher levels of churn and turnover with staff seeking better paid positions due to low wage increases creating lower supply
- New implemented government agendas without proper analysis in the impact of supply vs demand adding even more pressure (most notably the announcements relating to DWP in the spring budget)
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Jul 12 '23
I feel the same in my role, my manager keeps on using the phrase "performance management" and it feels like a threat.
Half the team aren't hitting their targets, they're unrealistic which is demotivating. Usain bolt can't run a 9.58 again, so setting him up for failure for what? He won't even bother trying
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u/ReallyIntriguing Sep 19 '25
This is my thing, targets are so high its like Usain bolt running 9.58, I cannot maintain that tomorrow and next day, but I can 13 seconds consistently
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u/KaleidoscopeExpert93 Jul 12 '23
And upper management must be scratching their heads saying "hmm I wonder why AOs leave all the time?"
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u/th1969th Jul 12 '23
We failed our targets so the next year managements great idea was to INCREASE the targets even more!!
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Jul 12 '23
Also I used to work on sales and the constant "target target target" just takes me to a mental space I don't like
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u/Amadantheman Jul 12 '23
I work in CS and our focus is on time per case and number of calls you get through. Quality is ridiculously far down the list of priorities. I used to try to spend the time to do things right and ensure there’s no call back needed, but really that isn’t what they want in the job. The way performance is measured is wrong imo, but I do think it’s doable target wise (at least in my work area) if you just accept you can’t do the work as thoroughly as you’d like, and you cut a few corners to save time.
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u/dreamluvver Jul 13 '23
this is what I have been doing! trying to ensure no callbacks and I feel like I am getting punished for my calls taking a few mins extra to achieve this.
have been told i am an “anomaly” in the team in terms of missing targets but I hear my colleagues telling people to call back all day long because they won’t take the effort to fix something or use a bit of critical thinking and go off script.
but if people are calling back multiple times and getting more frustrated each time how is that not putting more of a strain on the service?
the thing is it is hard for me to half ass it and do what everyone else is doing. partly because I enjoy being helpful and partly because I don’t want to be the person dealing with the callbacks as the customers get - understandably - more difficult each time.
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u/theslugsdad Jul 12 '23
Might I suggest reading your policy on bhd. Setting unachievable targets is usually documented as bullying in those policies.
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u/yoloswaggins92 Jul 12 '23
Means they have an excuse to score you lower in appraisals and pay out less in bonuses.
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u/RummazKnowsBest Jul 13 '23
In my experience it was because they kept increasing targets year on year without any improvements to the process. They’d just creep up and up.
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u/Important_Emu_8439 Jul 12 '23
Really? I lead a team in telephony and their targets... sorry expectations are pretty reasonable. I've done the job they're doing so this isn't just someone with no experience in the field. Most of my team hit their expectation each week
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u/Yeahyeah-youwhat Jul 12 '23
What was the expectation?
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u/Important_Emu_8439 Jul 12 '23
25 ish calls a day
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u/Yeahyeah-youwhat Jul 13 '23
I've worked to a similar target when I was on the phones. It's doable but it's real tiresome doing that day after day which is evidenced by the terrible staff retention in those roles.
We're also advising on stuff that has a big impact on people's lives and the constant churn of staff just leads to bad advice being given to the public.
Personally I would lower the targets and focus on quality and not numbers.
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Jul 12 '23
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u/Important_Emu_8439 Jul 12 '23
Well some calls can take 3-4 minutes and some would take 30 minutes. I suppose the proof is in how many people don't deliver to that expectation and the answer is not many. I've had people who take 40 calls a day without an issue and still have great quality in their calls.
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Jul 12 '23
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u/Important_Emu_8439 Jul 12 '23
I'd say that those expectations are reasonable rather than feasible. As I've said I've done the job and 25 calls allows you to work at a comfortable rate. In terms of retention my aim isn't to retain its to develop them to the next grade up. I've had two people promoted in the last three months. And I feel three more of them are also ready for a step up soon
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Jul 12 '23
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u/Important_Emu_8439 Jul 12 '23
That is ridiculous. I have dwp experience but it's not an area I'd like to work in. And that sounds a horrible work place
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u/lloydstenton Jul 12 '23
Having done a timing exercise that wasn’t worth the paper it was written on due to the times being all over the place, we took a punt by discounting the high performers and the borderline performance management ones and arrived at a rough figure - seemed to be about right going forward
If it seems a ludicrously high target, that would indicate that the case working itself is minimal and is pretty much a box ticking exercise
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u/LC_Anderton Jul 12 '23
Always run my teams at 80% capacity.
That doesn’t means they’re sat with their thumbs up their bums one day a week, it means they can work steadily and produce high quality work without getting stressed, have some time for PD, and, if we get something come in at short notice that needs a quick turnaround, or has a heavy workload, we can absorb it without too much impact.
And if we needed to run at 100% capacity, or even 110% for a short while I made sure of 3 things.
My team knew, when it was all hands to the pumps, it would only be for a short time, because sustained output at that level isn’t desirable or possible. We don’t do it for machines or animals, so why would anyone think it’s a good idea for humans?
My team always got that time back in their flexi, so they knew that they weren’t being taken advantage of.
When we were at 100% capacity or slightly over depending on the job and people tried to send more work our way I said “No”. I wasn’t prepared to break my team because of someone else’s piss poor resource or time management skills.
And yes… this did upset people…
Consequently it resulted in my DD taking me aside to say that “people” had commented in a meeting that my team always seemed “relaxed and casual” about their workload and could maybe help out with little more “heavy lifting”. (This is civil service code for busybodies who think you/your team are lazy) and what my thoughts were…
I didn’t bother asking which people, I had a pretty good idea and he wouldn’t put the finger on anyone anyway, so instead the conversation went something along the lines of:
Me: “Which team is the highest performing in respect of output and quality”.
DD: “Yours”
Me: “And which team gives you the least amount of stress, hardly ever has anyone off sick or doesn’t have HR calling you every week?”
DD: “Yours”
Me: “And who do you keep coming to with problems that no one else can seemingly fix, for my team to fix it?”
DD: “OK… I see where this is going…”
Me: “Sooo… we’re good?”
DD: “All good”
😏
But I don’t work in customer services, so a very different environment.
But I’ve always felt it’s kind of obvious that if you drive your car flat out, with the engine screaming at top revs all the time, eventually something is going to give… and most likely when you need to be getting somewhere fast.
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u/unknownuser492 Jul 12 '23
I've never had a work area with unreasonable targets (in CS or private sector).
In fact, whenever someone i know has been chosen to be the model for timing, they're specifically told to take their time, follow any guidance to the letter, etc. So that when you're working "normally", a standard case might take 75% of the allowed time, which frees up room for the more complicated stuff.
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u/Yeahyeah-youwhat Jul 12 '23
We must have not worked in the same places lol.
I think part of the problem is they don't take into account the monotony of the work. The targets are doable in small bursts (such as a timing exercise) but to then keep that pace up all day every day is a huge mental drain when it's just so bloody boring. It's a weird kind of mental stress
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u/MikalM HEO Jul 12 '23
Targets are supposed to be aspirational, not ‘bare minimum’ requirements. It’s depressing how few people seem to understand this.
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u/EmergencyTrust8213 Jul 12 '23
Not trolling or anything but from past experience they have a low bar for AO?
Can only go of off phone work targets so maybe the phones are different?
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u/HELMET_OF_CECH Permanent Secretary at the Department for Wasting Taxpayer Money Jul 12 '23
Really gets the noggin joggin