US banking giant Wells Fargo has sacked a number of employees following claims that staff were faking keyboard activity to fool the company into thinking they were working when they were not.
It is not yet clear how the issue was discovered or whether it was specifically related to people working from home.
The US bank said staff had been fired or resigned “after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work”.
New rules recently came into effect in the US which mean that brokers working from home must be inspected every three years.
Wells Fargo (and Boeing) largely illustrate Goodhart’s Law; they don’t use metrics correctly. But more than anything else, those companies are demonstrations of the risk of having only one metric that supersedes all others: short-term profit.
The fact that a company uses metrics doesn’t prove they’re doing the right thing. They have to use good metrics well, have good practices and processes around metrics, understand them, and not using them as targets. Wells Fargo’s troubles mainly stemmed from violating Goodhart’s Law.
True, having the right metric is important. But having no metric might be an overreaction to the crisis caused by bad metrics.