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A comment on At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home. Parent comment

Re:At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at ... by cryptonector on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @01:12AM (#24478074)
This. The productivity of a business is its ROI, roughly its profit + reinvestment. The productivity of a salesperson is also easy to measure: sales / compensation and travel costs. It's much harder to measure the productivity of an individual employee who is not a salesperson or directly supporting sales. Some are rockstars, and these you know when you see them. But the rest... it's harder to tell. Metrics can only do so much, and often they are easily gamed -- they just aren't directly related to the bottom line because these aren't salespeople, but you can't only have salespeople either. Take sprints: if you really want employees to hit every sprint then they'll work hard to hardly load their sprints. As you say, there isn't really a market inside a business, so it's hard to just look at the "bottom-line" for every non-sales force employee.
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Re:At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at ... by etripe on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @05:59AM (#24479527)
> The productivity of a salesperson is also easy to measure: sales / compensation and travel costs.

It's not that simple, because most companies don't perform inter-departmental cost accounting. A salesperson might seem to be very productive, while actually selling made-up solutions that are very cost-intensive to implement. To get a real number on how productive they are, you would need to measure:

([sum of sales * price] - [sum of solutions sold * implementation cost]) / compensation

or even:

customer price * weighted average of per-deal profit margin / total compensation

The cost to implement isn't added value. This kind of internal debiting would also change how management looks at IT. If they can solve the problem for less than the estimated cost by the salesperson, they're turning a profit. If they're taking longer due to "science fiction" products being sold, the blame lies squarely with sales. As it is now, salespeople are mainly incentivised for units sold and total price for deals made. You can be a rockstar salesperson while simultaneously mainly causing huge problems downstream.

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