The people doing the work have a ton of vital insight on how to keep the business productive and efficient.

Fortunately, if the person they report to makes things work poorly, there are loads of ways to prove it.

See how this team got things changed.

Supervisor says phones are all that matter. Okay then!

My coworker got promoted to a new supervisor position for all the wrong reasons. She’s besties with the boss and gives him relationship advice on the side.

Our team handles many types of incoming requests. They are phone calls, emails, tickets, and even printer jobs that get printed out automatically.

We have a really chill system that actually works: everyone helped where needed, and the manager trusted us to get the work done.

That harmony is about to fall apart.

Nobody tracked individual stats or micromanaged. We just got everything handled and kept things running smoothly and its been that way in this department for probably 30 years now.

Then my new supervisor comes along and I guess decides she wants to tighten things up or increase accountability or something.

Her big idea? “From now on, I’ll be tracking phone calls for performance metrics. Make sure everyone’s doing their job and no ones slacking.”

So of course we asked, “What about tickets and emails? Those take most of the time.”

She says, “Well, there’s no way to measure those right now so we can’t really track that.”

Umm, ok?

So they obeyed her weird command.

So of course, everyone does exactly what she asked.

Phone rings? Answer it immediately. If we were working on an email and a phone call comes in? Put it on pause and answer the call. Working on a ticket? Pause, gotta answer a call.

So naturally emails start piling up in the shared mailbox, tickets sit untouched in the internal portal (which management still doesn’t know how to run reports on), and the printer starts piling up paper in front of it.

After a couple of days, people from other departments, people from our satellite offices, and even some of our external customers start emailing and calling asking if we’re “backed up” because nobody’s responding to tickets or emails.

One guy even came down in person to ask why no one has reached out to him about the email he sent in.

Now there’s enough to make things change.

When asked what was going on we just repeated what supervisor told us. “Focus on the phones since that’s what matters.”

A few days later, I saw the supervisor get called into a meeting with the boss. When she comes out, she’s clearly annoyed and sends out a message on teams saying,

“Please remember that all work types are important, not just phone calls.”

And just like that, the “performance tracking” policy quietly vanished.

We’re back to doing all the work again, the same way we’ve been doing it successfully for years.

Here is what folks are saying.

Especially with anything that tracks worker “activity” at home.

And she will never see the irony.

Absolutely!

Good way to put it.

Says a lot about her competence.

Sounds like she’ll never accept responsibility.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.