Yeah that's a BRILLIANT idea! (quota rant)

[CrazedClerkthe2nd]

We have sales quotas.

The economy is in the crapper.

As such we have been missing our goals. Mind you we've been selling pretty steadily and even beat last year's numbers in a couple of areas, but we've still missed the goals.

Why is this?

Well we weren't making goals as of August, so corporate decided in their infinite wisdom to RAISE the goals, apparently thinking this would be some kind of "kick in the butt" for us to get our numbers up.

Fast forward to last week,

Goals still aren't being reached, though as before our sales are still decent. Corporate is still not satisfied, so what do they do to us?

If you guessed "raised the goal again" you win today's prize!



I just don't understand this, why do they think that raising some silly number is going to make us magically sell more stuff. You can argue that they could threaten to fire us if we don't make the goals, but that won't fly when NO ONE makes the ridiculously high goals they set for us. If they fired everyone who missed goal, they would lose a lot of good people and they know it.

[Sheldonrs]

It's kind of a win-win for corporate. If you DO make the goals, they win. If not, they can use that as the reason for not giving raises or bonuses, etc and they win that way.

[bainsidhe]

What Sheldon said.

I might also mention that Media Play did the same thing the year before they filed bankruptcy and laid off their workforce. We were pushed to sell the Replay (rewards) card like mad and extended warranties. Guess what couldn't be used all of a sudden? Yeah, customers lost their investment and we employees lost our jobs.

[mikoyan29]

This is amazing considering that we are in the days of Six Sigma, which is supposed to be an improvement over the philosophies of Deming. Deming abhorred quotas because they are typically arbitrary and aren't based on things that employees have control over. Plus they tend to encourage the wrong types of behavior.

Blah.