" Monzo and the pitfalls of staff surveillance"

UK Monzo Chat
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Before you read this - please note that I haven’t read every post in the thread, but I thought it was worth sharing a bit more detail about my experience with this sort of thing, and how it works in my job role as a financial crime investigator (& how I’ve seen the other side of it when I’ve been stepping up into team manager roles on various occasions).

I think it’s fair to say that some people at Monzo have, do and will in the future find the targets used to monitor performance hard, in the same way for some people the actual job isn’t for them. Personally, having come from two previous industries with with target driven cultures I’ve never had an issue with them. It might be because I’ve never had an issue with my performance at Monzo, and I’ve never found any of the targets particularly hard to meet. When I have had any periods where I haven’t met targets then the sole focus has been around how can I be supported to meet those targets. (as an example I once had a month where my activity was 0! It turned out I’d installed an ad blocker which was interfering with how we tracked activity at that time. It was obvious from the other ways we look at performance that I was still working, and this was clearly a data error)

I think the working assumption of many in this thread is that activity is the sole measure used to monitor performance and that certainly isn’t the case.

In my role there are three main things I’m measured on - average handling time (measured over a month), activity and quality assurance. Generally you have a weekly check in with your manager, then we complete a self and manager assessment each month and progression (ie pay rises) are based on your average performance over the previous six months (soon to be 12 months) which smooths out the highs and lows.

You aren’t judged solely on a single measure, but the most important measure is quality assurance - in other words making the right decision, first time, for our customers.

You can sacrifice your AHT and activity for QA, and I regularly repeat that message internally whenever I’m coaching or when I’ve been managing teams temporarily. Quality comes first, every time.

When it comes to making a decision as to how an employee has performed in a given month the targets aren’t there as a brick wall. We have three categories of performance - exceeding expectations, meeting expectations and needs support. We have a performance framework which guides these decisions and your activity, AHT and QA form just part of these.

Activity is the big thing which seems to be the focus of these headlines and the discussion here - but it really is just part of it.

It isn’t measured on clicks, or whether you move the mouse or anything like that. It’s based on how active you are in our internal software. If you’re in a customer’s account, sending emails or reviewing internal data then you’re marked as active. A lot part of my time is reviewing accounts and writing notes - this is all captured but if I have to spend time coaching another colleague or dealing with escalations and my activity drops then as long as I can explain that - it’s not a problem.

Working like that won’t be for everybody - but I think that’s okay. It isn’t used as a draconian measure it’s just a data point to help inform your own performance and to manage somebody.

At the end of the day we schedule our teams based around the expected inbound from our customers - we know what the average employee can close in an hour, and we schedule to make sure we’ve got enough people to service our customers. If people aren’t meeting their quota of tasks, the hours they’re supposed to be work or the quality then the people who suffer are YOU!

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Do engineering staff have similar metrics? I would have thought measuring how active they are in whatever IDE (development tools) they use, on Slack, analysing data etc seems like exactly the same thing.

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I don’t know if the monitoring is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but I wouldn’t work for a company that monitored like this. I’d find it patronising and lacking in trust. I do work hard, as is shown by my results and performance. But if my employer didn’t trust me enough that they felt they needed to check me every five minutes my main recommendation to them would be not to bother hiring me in the first place.

Perhaps I could live with it if it applied to everyone at the company. But let’s face it, the implicit belief here is ‘the low paid can’t be trusted’

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I honestly have no idea!

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Demonstrated and recorded how?

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Targets set by my managers/the business. Weekly, monthly, quarterly as well as per-project metrics and reviews of each project.

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That just sounds like a slightly different wording of what Dan wrote at length above from a wider COps perspective

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Not really. I have agency over how I hit my targets, and my employer trusts I am motivated enough to work hard in general.

No one is checking me every five minutes and I don’t have to explain to anyone why I took a 15 minute break etc

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I eventually ducked out of the other topic, and I am going to make a quicker exit this time - lesson learnt - but surely that reflects the different line of work as much as anything?

Customer service, manufacturing cars or TVs, or packing at Amazon could never truly offer such agency as ultimately numbers need to be pushed through to keep the show on the road

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I work in customer service too though at the minute.

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I don’t think anyone is getting persuaded/dissuaded away from their opinion, but Dan was at pains to argue the exact opposite to that above, and he’s as well placed as anyone to comment on that (on the forum anyway)

Off now to eat potatoes. Have a nice rest of weekend everyone

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I’m really not sure what evidence you’ve got for this statement, because all the experiences I’ve had are completely opposite :person_shrugging:

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you should have added …(unnecessarily …obvs )

and I work there :grinning:

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But what would you know, you know, working there! :rofl:

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I think where we disagree is that the amount you are ‘active’ is a performance measure. How many people you help, how well you help them, those things are all performance.

How long my team are logged in for, that’s just attendance monitoring, and measuring attendance on a five minute basis - I wouldn’t want that (for myself or for my team). As you say, though, employees can always leave.

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It works very differently now to how it worked in 2019.

If I compare it when I worked in teaching and the performance related pay as head of department which was based on the results of the teachers in my department whose own results were dependent on how the students performed on a given day, at least now my metrics are in my own direct control.

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Late to the party and skim read but isn’t this how pretty much every contact centre works? Mainly because even remotely they are a sizeable cost to the business and people sitting there googling their name doesn’t earn money.

From what I can see from reading it’s what I’d expect if I were back in that industry. Gratefully, I’m not and there’s a trust that I’ll do the right thing

If that means I choose to start earlier or later in a day as long as it’s reasonable (i.e. I don’t turn up at 11am each day when others come in for 9am) then that’s fine with me. I’m fully remote all the time for context.

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Interesting thread. I’m pretty much opposed to the concept of workstyle ‘surveillance’ or ‘monitoring’. But interesting bag of views in here. My own to follow.

But with this they are not monitoring service levels. They are monitoring how active an employee is within a 5 minute time frame. It speaks nothing of either their productivity, service level, or job output quality.

So what are they measuring/

This is disagree with too - create meaningful job specifications, with clear objectives and SMART targets, ways to demonstrate those SMART targets have been delivered, and meaningful + regular check ins with a supervisor of some kind.

None of that needs remote monitoring solutions.

I think all this style of monitoring does is encourage people to pass the monitoring check, not improve outputs.

What is useful then? What I’d want to understand is what is the goal Monzo are trying to deliver here? There’s talk of service level, productivity, etc etc. But all this delivers is a click every 5 minutes.

And what is the role of the people this surveillance is surveilling? Is it frequent ticket closer, is it consumer experience improver, problem solver? All look very different. Becuause having a good “service level”, as a consumer looks somewhat different depending on the KPI that is in place at Monzo (Consumer Satisfaction vs Ticket closure speed)

To me it sounds like Monzo don’t know/have clear KPIs, and or a clear way to RCA/Problem solve when they are not being met.

IMHO anyway.

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I will add though I guess tht gets into a discussion of monitoring vs results tracking - which I suppose could be argued as closely related.

For me it all comes back to how an organisation defines it’s KPI’s / KRI’s - which ones are mission critical and how then they keep those things on or off track.

There’s a need to measure a result/kpi - “what gets measured gets done” - but that’s separate to monitoring, and again needs a clear thought out view of how the measure results in success, for it to be a ‘good’ measure.

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To me the only reason why such a system should be in place would be to manage coverage for shifts.

Activity is not a mark of productivity, as it’s been pointed out earlier in the thread you could have a really productive person who could hit a full day’s quota of tasks in half day.
However that begs the question, is there a need to hire/pay for a full time employee if a part time one would get the job done?
Scale that up to the size of company that monzo is, that is striving for profitability, and it becomes a very important question.

Overall though I’m in the camp that individuals shouldn’t be monitored in this way, if you can’t trust someone to crack on with it don’t hire them, hire someone you do trust until they give you a reason not to. If management can’t cope with the level of trust that requires then I question their management style.

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