I've actually worked at a place that did something like this, although I suspect it wasn't for positive reasons. It was a call center, and they had status tiers for wages - e.g. if you were an "A player" you would get $.50/hr more, or if you were a "star player" you would get $1/hr more (or whatever the amounts were). These statuses were tied to various metrics that the business cared about - average call time, quality scores from customer surveys, repeat calls, and so on. So ostensibly, if you got the current metric down to whatever the goal was, you would get a raise for a month or whatever.

The problem was that the business changed these metrics on the phone reps all the time, so it was common for some poor bastard to really strive to get his call times down, only to be told "oh sorry we're focusing on quality scores this month" when reviewing his work with the boss. My impression was that the company was doing this to avoid having to actually pay people more, not to keep people from gaming metrics - but I think the results would be pretty similar regardless of motive.

What happened wasn't that people focused on trying to be great generalists. Instead they got demoralized by the games the company was playing, and they would either quit trying to improve at all or they would exclusively focus on one metric (so that they could get the big raise when that metric was being rewarded next).

Based on that experience, I'm somewhat doubtful that what you propose would work. But it might - unfortunately the workers at that call center were very often real fuckups all around, so the idea might work at a business which has better quality employees.

If you have management failing to communicate business needs they'll make everyone beneath them look just as bad if not worse.

At the end of the day there's nothing naive about doing a good job. If you have any employees focusing too much on metrics, but especially your management, they're incompetent dead weight.

Doing a good job is simply less work for everyone, but it starts from the top down.

To clarify: each month measure a real business need. The trick here is that there are many needs, and the selection must be random each month.

Take a service like Google search as an example: if the number of searches per month is the consistent KPI for the tech team, then they’re incentivised to sacrifice customer satisfaction by returning junk results so that users are forced to do multiple searches to find what they want.

But if they’re only rewarded for the increased search volume the one time, the next month the metric might be customer satisfaction instead and they’ll be penalised for cheating in this manner.

The key aspect is not repeating metrics — but the metrics should be valid.

The problem with this is that it incentives short-term thinking, allowing you to juice the numbers temporarily, and at cost to the metrics that are not currently prioritized. But there's something to the idea.

You’re not told ahead of time what the metrics will be, so you can’t cheat and/or plan ahead other than by being generally good at your job across all likely metrics.

You mean to say that the metrics are applied post-hoc. I.e. you reward last month's efficiency this month.

Otherwise, you incentivize poor performance all the time, so that I can show massive improvement on this month's "efficiency push", next months "productivity (lines of code, completed stories) push", the "bug bash", etc.

Yes, precisely.

This is brilliant and psychotic.

Psychotic indeed. It would feel like working for the mad hatter.

“I expect you to do your job.”

“Madness! You’re crazy! I can’t be expected to work under these conditions!”