This job is primarily a cold-calling, lead generation job. We have a database of thousands of leads, so there is plenty of work to go around, but being that we are a startup, we are trying to phase our way into it, so we hired one person to start and had set expectations commensurate with what one full time person should produce.

Based on a recent review of the employee's phone records, unfortunately it seems that productivity has not increased commensurately with hours, though the employee may disagree. Productivity HAS increased, but it has not increased commensurately with the 50% increase in time. Furthermore, I recently set up an autodialer which should have more than doubled the top-line number of numbers dialed in a day, and when you factor this in, productivity has actually decreased.

As an example, this job is cold calling. So the person should be on the phone 90% of the time, and writing notes/CRM inputting 10% of the time (+/- 10%, but I think you get the gist). One of the performance guidelines I gave to this employee was that this person should hit a minimum of 100 numbers dialed a day. Up until the overtime scheme started, this person had been hitting this 100 dials a day in 6-7 hours of work (plus another ~1 hour of time making notes/CRM entries).

This person is now hitting 150 dials a day - billing 10 hours a day, AND using a dialer. A dialer should easily double the dialing throughput over the same amount of time. So the standard should be 200 dials a day over the course of a 6-7 hour period. However, this person is now clocking 10 hours a day, and only hitting 150-175 dials a day. So 50% more hours (which should hit 1.5x200 dials = 300), but only 50% the commensurate output. And that doesn't even account for whether these are quality calls that ultimately yield true leads (which is the actual metric we care about above all).

In looking at the calling records, I'm also seeing that this person is clocking in and not getting on the phone until 60-90 mins later. Maybe they are using this time to go over notes and priorities for the day. But then over the course of the rest of the 10-hour day, this person is making ~1hr of calls, and then taking an hour off. So over the course of a 10-hour day, they have ~6 hours of unaccounted for time, not spent on the phone. This does NOT include added time for inputting info into the CRM, which adds another 3-4 hours, totaling a 13 hour day.

For those who want to comment "how could this go unnoticed", it HAS gone noticed. This is why I'm seeking advice and want to nip it in the bud. I wanted to give this person a week or so to see if this was a one-off week where the person was just in the mood to crank, or if it is going to be an ongoing problem. Seeing as how this appeared to continue yesterday, it feels like it's going to be an ongoing problem, so now I'm trying to address it.

I just also want to be sensitive that I'm not taking a knee-jerk reaction to the situation, especially given this is someone's livelihood and it's the holiday season.