Recycled Bullsh-IT

What Do You Want?

With performance bonuses and pay rises now commonly tied to personal objectives in most companies, everyone is incentivised to spend more time on the (up)setting of their objectives to avoid a year of hell followed by the crushing disappointment of an empty pay packet.

What Do I Have to Do?

Everyone is told that the best objectives are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-based). So why do so many people’s objectives strike them as DUMB?

• Diabolical: The devil itself have fiendishly fixed your futile and now frightful future by finding some fatuous functions to finish you off, such as your boss stating “here’s my objectives for the year. Make sure you sort them out, OK?”
• Unachievable: You might have the joke quote “The impossible I do immediately, miracles take a little longer” on your (virtual) desktop, but you didn’t expect that your personal plan for the year would require you to turn the quote into reality
• Meaningless: At the other end of the spectrum, you will be bombarded with barmy bollocks to blunt your brain, such as “Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough” by the empathising Mark Zuckerberg
• Belittling: We all like to think we are reasonably professional at work, so being set an objective like “fill your timesheet in every week” makes us want to wilfully disobey our micro-managing, micro-aggressive micro-moronic mangler

Do What You Gotta Do

If you have been set some reasonable SMART goals, you’ll probably feel OK about cruising through the year – just remember not to leave them until the last minute to scrape through, unless you have the lazy gene. More likely you’ll have a set of DUMB impossibilities to achieve, so you’ll need some of these SCAT-ological tactics below to get through them:

• Substitute: Find an equivalent deliverable which you can argue is a fair replacement for what was asked for “I’ve reduced headcount as requested by firing the new lackeys you just recruited, as they were still in their probation period, rather than my own team”
• Cheat: Change the rules so you now pass: “We’ve dropped company mobile phones by enforcing a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy, thus saving 10% of the telephony budget as requested.” Your boss might get some fruity comments from the other directors, which should increase your satisfaction
• ·Avoid: Reduce your stack of impossibilities by kicking some into the future: “I persuaded our business sponsor that the system upgrade would be too risky, so it’s been bumped to next year”
• Trick: Deliver a solution but not in the expected way: “We’ve moved everyone to the same version of Windows, as required, by downgrading all PCs to Windows XP”

Leader of the Pack

When it comes to setting OK objectives for your own org, it pays to have four Is:

• Inspiring: Remember that the best objectives act as an incentive to exhibit the best behaviours and deliver the results, so get them to want to do it
• Inventive: Boring goals drain the energy from your staff, so find fun ways to set targets that will keep your minions amused and entertained amongst the daily drudgery
• Individual: Make it personal. No one wants to be an identikit work drone, so make them feel in-duh-vidual by tailoring the objectives to suit the person in front of you
• Inevitable: If your worker feels that the task is impossible or is too difficult, they will take the SCAT approach above and, er, SCAT on you. Explain to them how easy the task is and how you will (almost) guarantee they will succeed, thereby reassuring them that their pitiful annual bonus is safe

Yes, annual performance objectives are probably just a distraction from the day job, but you might as well play the game as it acts as a distraction from your jobbing day…

 John ‘Scat Cat’ Moe