When I was a kid, just a few years ago, I worked on the land during each and every school holiday. I picked plums, apples, pears, strawberries, raspberries, beans, peas, and for one miserable week I pulled beetroot and filled wet hessian sacks in the rain. I even worked on wheat harvests, hauling hundredweight sacks by hand, and spent many long summer evenings bringing in hay from the fields. In those days, no-one mentioned targets probably because they were implicit and in jobs that were piecework, self imposed. You could spend all day in an orchard and fill as few or as many boxes as you liked. You only got paid for what you did. Self imposed targets work well as they are often linked to incentives rather than threats.
I did take on jobs that had targets imposed by physical means. One summer I worked in a cannery, and spent a long time getting to know broad beans. My first job was on the machine that removed the beans from their pods. The beans arrived from the fields in sacks piled onto pallets. I emptied the sacks into the machine and my target was to empty the pallet before the next one arrived. Failure to do so meant a backlog and that encouraged the management to start paying attention. Those that picked the beans also had targets; they were paid by weight and each bag had to hold the same amount. That target was occasionally met by putting bricks into the bags along with the beans. This did wonders for the machinery and we were supposed to make sure that bricks did not get past us. That of course meant we had to work slower and so the pickers bypassing their targets meant that it was harder for us to hit ours, and when bricks got into the viners, the whole line would come to a halt while screens were repaired.
We live in a society where targets seem to have become the be all and end all. Schools have to ensure that a set percentage of students pass their exams within certain set grade boundaries. Failure is penalised by OFSTED and the media. OFSTED operates on the misguided notion that all year groups are identical. Those who have worked in education know that this is not the case - there are good years and there are bad years, and this makes it very difficult to meet targets that someone festering in an office somewhere has dreamed up and imposed on everyone.
The health service has become hide bound by government targets. It is all very well to insist that a patient must be seen within a very short time frame and would be admirable as an aim if there were sufficient staff to meet that target. As it happens the target is being met by and large but the attention that patients receive has probably deteriorated, as health workers are so busy filling in forms and hurrying queues through the doors. Nurses are no longer carers as they once were; they too are busy, polishing their degrees and writing reports; patients get in the way.
Imposition of targets on people who are already working hard is counterproductive, and there needs to be a rethink on public service contracts in particular. Working with people is not like working with machinery or with bank balances and it is unfair of any government to fail to take into account the fact that people are individuals and cannot be relied upon to perform in predictable ways.
Let people set their own targets and maybe performances will improve.
I did take on jobs that had targets imposed by physical means. One summer I worked in a cannery, and spent a long time getting to know broad beans. My first job was on the machine that removed the beans from their pods. The beans arrived from the fields in sacks piled onto pallets. I emptied the sacks into the machine and my target was to empty the pallet before the next one arrived. Failure to do so meant a backlog and that encouraged the management to start paying attention. Those that picked the beans also had targets; they were paid by weight and each bag had to hold the same amount. That target was occasionally met by putting bricks into the bags along with the beans. This did wonders for the machinery and we were supposed to make sure that bricks did not get past us. That of course meant we had to work slower and so the pickers bypassing their targets meant that it was harder for us to hit ours, and when bricks got into the viners, the whole line would come to a halt while screens were repaired.
We live in a society where targets seem to have become the be all and end all. Schools have to ensure that a set percentage of students pass their exams within certain set grade boundaries. Failure is penalised by OFSTED and the media. OFSTED operates on the misguided notion that all year groups are identical. Those who have worked in education know that this is not the case - there are good years and there are bad years, and this makes it very difficult to meet targets that someone festering in an office somewhere has dreamed up and imposed on everyone.
The health service has become hide bound by government targets. It is all very well to insist that a patient must be seen within a very short time frame and would be admirable as an aim if there were sufficient staff to meet that target. As it happens the target is being met by and large but the attention that patients receive has probably deteriorated, as health workers are so busy filling in forms and hurrying queues through the doors. Nurses are no longer carers as they once were; they too are busy, polishing their degrees and writing reports; patients get in the way.
Imposition of targets on people who are already working hard is counterproductive, and there needs to be a rethink on public service contracts in particular. Working with people is not like working with machinery or with bank balances and it is unfair of any government to fail to take into account the fact that people are individuals and cannot be relied upon to perform in predictable ways.
Let people set their own targets and maybe performances will improve.
