You work piles off while people take time off, then it suggests that management is sabotaging peoples vacancies. For most people and situations, whether or piles up or is organizational choice.
That’s an incentive problem not a “be in the office” problem. Or you’ve hired lazy bums. Or the work isn’t interesting enough.
If the people are screwing around then fire them. More than likely the job is dull or not challenging or not rewarding enough. That’s a call for the company to step up their game and bring in A level talent.
Or don’t and keep on getting the C team that’s only doing busy work as a boss is looking over their shoulder.
How can anyone say anything definitive from this little information? Some manager dislikes a few of his employees. Scatterbrained appearances can be indicative of so many things: a poor work environment, terrible communication, lack of culture, or no team gelling. There's also just people unqualified for their job, but a 50% miss rate in hiring? That sounds unlikely. Or like your biggest problem.
Or, that management thinks the work they're having employees do sucks, and their employees are going to slack off as much as they can if left unsupervised. Also, that management doesn't have much in the way of supervisory powers apart from tracking hours at the office.
I think the author’s framework is that most “other factors” would be fixed if the team had more slack. So increase the team’s head count, wait for them to gel, and then with the new slack they should be able to resolve the issues.
I agree that there could be other factors (eg a toxic employee, say a TL or manager that is holding everybody back, or an ill-defined mission/mandate). But this article is really just answering the question of where and in what order to add employees if you’re doing hiring, rather than giving you a reason to hire more people.
This situation is not unusual in the corporate world. Contractors -- many times temporary workers from another country -- are brought in, kept for a fixed number of months, then let go. This is all done without any clue at all as to how it's actually affecting production.
I worked at one place that was 70% contract workers. Every year, they would have to leave. No fooling around -- nobody worked a day more than a year.
With people staggered throughout the project, all coming on at different times, it was like productivity roulette. One month a team might lose somebody who wasn't such a great worker. Whew! Dodged a bullet! The next month they might lose a third of the team within 2 weeks.
I know what you're thinking; just make a chart and keep track of when folks are leaving. But replacements weren't available until there was a documented need, which couldn't happen until the vacancies appeared. Sometimes then it would take a month or two to get one.
All of this organizational cruft was created at the highest levels, where everything is always peachy. I don't think the people creating this mess were trying to do anything bad. They just couldn't see the impact of what they were doing. By the time status reports moved up through several levels of management, things were looking good. Always.
Kinda sounds like poor management. It seems to me that proper management would have everything arranged such that an employee is a drop and replace asset.
That is a huge problem at the majority of places I have worked. I think that really comes into play when they have too many employees and not enough projects.
If this is happening, it's 100% due to bad management. It means the employee wasn't given creative freedom and a strategic direction to go in. The very last thing any manager should ever do is punish their best employees (e.g. the person who can finish a whole day's worth of work very quickly).
Mediocre employees = showing up on time, being well-meaning, but making very slow progress and many mistakes due to a lack of, to be honest, intelligence. Not really understanding why those mistakes are a problem even after receiving an explanation and coaching. Do you think that's a death sentence?
Is this perhaps a sign that you have terrible work conditions? Or perhaps you aren't paying enough?
Seems more likely than "the people we hire are usually terrible workers".
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