Your Employees Are Doing Exactly What You Paid Them to Do.

Before you tell me the employees don't care, show me what happens to the ones who do the work you claim to value.

You paid marketing for leads. You got leads.

You paid sales for signatures. You got signatures.

You rewarded the manager for staying under budget. The manager postponed the training, the maintenance, and the hire.

Now the leads aren't buying, the signed work isn't profitable, and the department depends on three exhausted people pretending the understaffing is temporary.

Management wants to know why nobody thinks about the whole business.

I want to know why management paid everybody to think about their own fucking number.

I'm going to inspect the assignment

I don't start by accepting management's explanation that the staff has an attitude problem. I want to understand the work, the money, the authority, and the consequences.

What are people expected to accomplish? What can they actually control? What gets measured? What gets rewarded? What happens when doing the right thing makes the reported number worse? OPM's federal performance-management guidance likewise emphasizes connecting individual expectations and rewards to organizational goals while considering quality, quantity, timeliness, cost-effectiveness, development, and continuing feedback. [1]

Those answers won't explain every employee decision. They will tell me whether the company is making the behavior it wants practical or expensive.

Suppose a salesperson rejects a customer the business cannot serve profitably. Does management support that decision? Or does the salesperson lose income, miss a target, and get asked why the pipeline declined?

If rejecting bad business carries every immediate penalty and signing it carries an immediate reward, don't act astonished when your staff hears the second instruction more clearly.

You made that instruction consequential.

I care what remains after the sale

My focus is high-ticket service businesses in competitive local markets. In that setting, more inquiries or larger contracts can look impressive without improving the economics of the operation.

I want to follow the customer from acquisition through qualification, sale, delivery, and collection. What did the business spend? What did it collect? What did the work consume? What did it prevent the team from doing for other customers?

A department can hit its target while pushing cost or risk into the next department.

Marketing celebrates the lead volume. Intake absorbs the screening. Sales promises the exception. Operations delivers it. Finance chases the payment. The owner asks why revenue increased without a corresponding improvement in profit or cash.

That's the operating chain I want to examine before somebody proposes another motivational meeting.

You offered $16,000 for the signature

Consider a hypothetical service business paying 8 percent of signed contract value when the agreement is executed.

A salesperson signs a $200,000 engagement and earns $16,000. Later, unpriced work expands the scope, delivery costs increase, and collection slows. The company makes little or loses money.

This is an invented example. I'm not describing an employer's compensation plan.

Was the salesperson irresponsible? Possibly. Investigate what they knew, what they promised, and whether they followed the approval process.

Then investigate the company.

Did you define acceptable customers and scope? Did sales have enough information to recognize the margin problem? Could operations reject promises it couldn't deliver? Who approved exceptions? Did a manager demand that the deal close anyway?

You offered $16,000 for the signature. What did you establish around that reward to protect the result the business actually needed?

I'm not prescribing a universal commission formula. Moving every risk onto the salesperson can be just as badly designed if they can't control delivery or collection. I'm asking whether the plan, the authority, and the business objective fit together.

Cheap leads can be an expensive purchase

Tell marketing to reduce cost per lead and it can pursue that number through changes to targeting, offers, forms, and qualification.

If the resulting inquiries require more staff time and produce fewer profitable customers, the cheaper lead may be a worse investment.

Before I conclude that happened, I want evidence. Are the inquiries being answered? Are the records accurate? Is sales following up? Is the offer competitive? Does the customer actually want it, rather than merely have the money to afford it?

“The leads are shit” is an accusation. Show me what makes them unqualified and what happens to the ones that qualify.

Then give the people responsible a usable feedback loop. You can't deny marketing access to relevant downstream results, forbid changes to the offer, and still demand that it solve the entire commercial operation through an advertising setting.

If the real objective is profitable customers, the evaluation has to acknowledge the journey to profitable customers. It also has to distinguish what marketing controls from what other teams control.

Otherwise, the performance review becomes a contest over who can shove the failure furthest downstream.

Let's test the savings you keep celebrating

Here's another hypothetical. An intake operation receives 1,000 inquiries a month and rewards speed and short calls.

Suppose a proposed change would allow more complete qualification and requires two additional employees at a combined annual employment cost of $140,000. Assume, solely for the calculation, that it produces two additional customers per month, each contributing $8,000 after the relevant variable costs and before the added staffing cost.

That would produce $192,000 in annual additional contribution. Subtract the $140,000 staffing cost and the modeled improvement is $52,000 before other incremental expenses.

That arithmetic doesn't prove the hiring is justified.

The customers may not exist. They may take capacity away from more valuable work. The contribution estimate may be wrong. A process change might achieve the same result for less money. Collection might arrive too late to fund the transition.

And 1,000 inquiries plus an average call length does not establish a staffing requirement. You need the real workload, coverage, scheduling, follow-up, and service expectations. The two positions are an assumption to test.

What the example gives me is an operating question: did the speed target save money overall, or did it suppress contribution worth more than the apparent saving?

That's what I want to investigate. A department appearing efficient isn't sufficient evidence that the business made a good trade.

The reward might be getting left alone

Incentives aren't limited to commission checks.

The employee who identifies a broken process might get assigned to repair it without additional time or authority. The person who stays quiet might finish the day on schedule.

The employee who documents the system might fall behind on the production target. The employee who keeps the knowledge in their head might remain the hero who saves the week.

The manager who flags a risk might inherit the blame. The manager who delays acknowledging it might preserve the quarterly result.

Those are hypothetical patterns worth checking. You don't need a formal bonus plan to make some behavior more painful than other behavior. OSHA provides a documented regulatory example of the mechanism: an incentive tied to low reported injury numbers can discourage the reporting needed to identify hazards, which is why OSHA distinguishes rewarding safe practices from penalizing reports. [2]

Look at who gets overloaded, protected, promoted, interrupted, and heard. That's part of the incentive system people actually experience, whether or not it appears in a compensation plan.

Give somebody authority over the combined result

I don't want twenty-seven metrics and a formula nobody understands.

I want a clear objective, a few useful measures, and checks that reveal whether improving one result damaged another. I want the owner of each handoff identified. I want an approval path for exceptions and a person with authority to resolve conflicts between departments.

If you want documentation, fund the time. If you want qualification, allow people to reject unsuitable work. If you want growth, establish whether the capital and delivery capacity exist.

Then evaluate what happened over a period long enough for the important consequences to appear.

AI can help compare records or identify patterns in approved data. It doesn't know why someone behaved a certain way simply because it can generate an explanation. Use its output as something to investigate. Keep personnel and company information inside approved systems, and keep a person accountable for decisions about people.

Adults are still responsible for their conduct

An incentive doesn't excuse deception, abuse, or knowingly ignoring a sound process. Sometimes the employee is the problem. Sometimes management's design is reasonable and somebody chooses to exploit it.

I want the evidence before the diagnosis, whichever direction it points.

But once management has credible evidence that its rewards are driving harmful behavior, continuing the same system becomes another management decision.

You don't get to keep paying for the signature, celebrating the volume, punishing the time required for quality, and then announce that employees lack business judgment.

Inspect the assignment you made real through money, workload, authority, and consequences.

Your employees may be doing exactly what you paid them to do.

Now decide whether that's what you actually wanted to buy.

Continue Reading on anuhlest

• Everybody Is Responsible. Nobody Is Accountable. — why responsibility without authority, boundaries, and a decision owner becomes accountability theater.
• Everybody Did Everything Right. Did Any of That Shit Produce the Outcome You Needed? — why departmental activity and improved metrics can still miss the business result.
• You Hired Someone. Now What the Fuck? — why the role, resources, authority, and evaluation must begin with the work the business needs.
• Who the Fuck Approved This? — why an approved purchase still needs ownership of the resulting business consequence.