Recently my wife and I were struggling with the kids, which I hear is a common sentiment a year into the pandemic. Trying to teach and maintain healthy habits, we limit their screen time to an hour a day and 2.5 hours a day on the weekend, ask them to do chores around the apartment, and we try to limit their sugar intake. This has been, to put it mildly, a challenge.
They don’t want to do any of it, and will bend, break, or skirt the rules whenever they think they can get away with it. We’re trying to team them habits that are good for them now, and will be valuable skills later, but with the stress of eternal social distancing and a soft-lockdown, they’re waging a constant, low-grade rebellion… and winning. My daughter’s room is a hazardous waste site, our son needs constant supervision to turn in any school assignments on-time, and neither of them want to have anything to do with doing the dishes or taking out the trash.
This has led to a destructive cycle where we take away more and more screen time and privileges for misbehavior, and they then have fewer and fewer things that we can threaten them with, giving them little incentive to behave. This has led to a household where the kids are miserable and bored, the parents feel taken advantage of and frustrated, and the chores are still not getting done! We had reached the bottom.
It’s not a good system when literally no one is winning, so the other day I sat down to think about what we were doing wrong and I was reminded about another broken system that I inherited in the first few days of my current job.
Cherry-picking
Taking over the SaaS Support organization a year ago, one of my teams offered L1 support. It was a small team, that executed simple requests made by coworkers through a Service Desk portal. Ideally, the work was supposed to be frictionless, with requests getting done in under a day, no required clarification or follow-up from the requestor, and a first time delivery with quality.
It wasn’t working. The queue constantly had tickets in it that had failed SLA (our 24-hour delivery commitment), languishing for most of a week, and tickets were being rejected by the requestors at an unacceptable rate. Not much was working.
After talking to the members of the team individually they seemed intelligent, motivated, and competent. Mistakes were being made due to carelessness, not inability, and the tickets that were failing SLA were long-running tasks that took a lot longer than other tasks to execute. The problem didn’t appear to lie with the people, so the manager and I took a look at the system. Why wasn’t it working?
The team was graded by how many tickets they delivered within the 24-hour SLA that were accepted the first time. Sounds like a good definition of success, right? This is what we wanted, however it wasn’t achieving our goals. Digging deeper into the numbers we found a few causes of the problem:
- the team was rushing through execution, and not taking care to validate the result before delivering it to the customer in a quest for numbers.
- no one wanted to pick up the long-running tasks, because they could do fewer of them, and if they failed SLA they wouldn’t get any credit anyway.
The behaviors we were encouraging with our grading system was not aligned with the outcome we wanted. Aligning goals and incentives is easy to say, but very difficult to do. It has been poorly done by business and governments, large and small, everywhere, throughout all of time, and classically illustrated by the cobra effect.
Tasty Carrots and Sharp Sticks
First, we decided that allowing a team who is supposed to get tickets out as quickly as possible shouldn’t be spending time deciding what ticket they wanted to work on. It creates an incentive to cheat, one of the classic causes of goal misalignment. We created restrictions on the queue, where the tickets were prioritized by age, and an agent completing a task automatically had the next ticket in the queue assigned. No one could cheat, and no one had to worry that their co-workers were taking advantage of the system.
Secondly, we decided that prioritizing quality and productivity was incompatible. We changed the grading so the agents got credit for tickets that went past the SLA (only fair since they could no longer choose their tickets), in the hope that a focus on quality would lead to an increase in overall system productivity as Lean Six Sigma predicts.
It worked! Within two weeks, the team that consistently failed SLA on ~20% of requests, and had rejections on another 10%, got the backlog of tickets to under 10 during the working day and kept it there. Rejections also fell to less than 1% of requests. This was all done with no additional resources or automations. It has been over a year, and tickets that fail SLA are now very rare despite this no longer being a grading criteria.
Treating My Kids Like Employees
Now, how could I apply this approach to my kids? First, we had to decide what my wife and I wanted, keeping it simple and focused:
- good effort at school (grades are like SLA, not the measure we want to track)
- household chores done
What did the kids want?
- time on electronics
- desserts
With these goals and incentives in mind, we came up with a system that awarded them points for positive reports from school, and completion of chores that we thought the kids could handle on their own. Points could be lost for poor reports from school. These points could be converted to 30 minutes of electronics (up to the 1 hour per weekday and 2.5 hours per weekend day previously established), or five points for a dessert.
The next morning my daughter unloaded the dishwasher and my son made his bed, both without being asked, for the first time ever. A screaming success. It turns out that our arbitrary rewarding and punishing behaviors was demotivating to the kids. They were reluctant to perform a chore with an uncertain payout, and were less hesitant to do something wrong when the punishment was unknown. Now that they knew the score (literally!) they enthusiastically looked for ways to get more points, and now that my son knows that not doing an assignment could cost him his full hour of Fortnite that evening he is far more likely to get it done.
We’re all self-interested, and even the most disciplined of us is going to spend more time on things with a greater payoff and avoid things with a higher downside. One of the magical aspects of leadership is truly understanding your employees and the system in which they operate. Without that knowledge and empathy, you have no hope of designing a system so that it encourages the behaviors that provide the greatest payoff to the organization. But if you can do so, you can create an environment where employees love to come to work, and you never have to beg or threaten to get the results that you want.
