The Real Reason Your Agents Are Cheating to Hit Targets

Managing a call centre (or any organization) is all about performance. If a manager can show that their customers are happier, their sales rates have improved, costs have reduced, and service levels have risen, everybody is happy!

The standard management way to “drive performance improvement” is to set agents targets, add an incentive (a carrot or a stick), and then leave them to get on with it.

Given the complexity of the systems we work in, it is difficult (if not impossible) for an agent to improve performance on their own and – as consultant James Lawther explains – it is ever so much easier to fake a performance improvement than to deliver one.

Employees Cheat to Meet Targets Even in the Most Respectable Occupations

You may well be thinking, “not in my organization”, and maybe you are the exception, but even in the most respectable occupations, employees cheat and lie to meet their targets. That makes me sound horribly cynical, so let me back up my scepticism with a story…

In 2013, the US State of Georgia prosecuted 35 teachers, charging them with racketeering (dishonest and fraudulent business dealings).

The accusations revolved around “wrong-to-right erasures” in the annual Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT). For reference, a wrong-to-right erasure is a correction in a multiple-choice test from a wrong answer to a right one.

These changes are always present on test papers as students go back over their answers at the end of the exam and check them, but the number of modifications found by inspectors in Atlanta was extreme.

The State Prosecutor, Fani Willis, even told the jury that it was more likely that somebody was hit by lightning twice in the same week than that there would be this volume of changes:

“What you are going to learn is that in 2009, there were 256,769,000 wrong-to-right erasures… Do you know what the odds of such wrong-to-right erasures are? One in a quadrillion. That’s 15 zeros. A quadrillion.”⁠

178 Teachers Were Involved in Cheating

A few years earlier, an Atlanta newspaper published a story about rises in test scores in the city’s primary schools. The journalists couldn’t understand how the improvement had been so dramatic. The State Governor was also puzzled, so he started an investigation into the school system.

By the time the enquiry was complete, over 60 investigators had interviewed more than 2,100 people and looked at more than 800,000 documents.

They reported a litany of facts and figures:

178 teachers were involved in cheating.
38 of these were head teachers (principals).
82 teachers confessed to the allegations.
One principal forced a member of staff with low CRCT scores to crawl under a table at a faculty meeting.
Teachers arranged seating for tests so lower-performing children could copy the higher-scoring students’ answers.
Teachers pointed to the correct answer in exams while standing at students’ desks.

It turned out that when the exam papers were delivered to schools, a teacher would steal a single paper, take the test and prepare an answer key on a transparency sheet.

Once the exams were over, the teachers would use the key to make corrections. One group explained that they took the papers to a teacher’s home and had a “changing party”.

Another teacher admitted she had changed test results for four consecutive years. Yet another teacher described how students who fell asleep or refused to complete the exam still met or exceeded the test’s expectations.

Those Who Didn’t Improve Their Test Scores Were Subject to Remedial Actions

The story is shocking but doesn’t sound so bad (what harm did it do?) until you realize the authorities denied many children special educational assistance because their falsely reported CRCT scores were too high.

But why did the teachers cheat? The CRCT test scores were essential to Georgia’s compliance with the “No Child Left Behind Act”, passed by the US administration in 2002. The legislation was an attempt to raise education levels across the States.

The government expected schools to achieve “adequate yearly progress”, and the target ratcheted up annually. Those who didn’t improve their test scores were subject to remedial actions. These ranged from school improvement plans to staff replacement and potential closure.⁠

Three years before the Act, Atlanta had appointed a new head of education, Beverley L. Hall. Ms Hall promoted a “data-driven” system. Her mantra was “no exceptions, no excuses”.

Hall linked principal’s evaluations to test scores to ensure she met government targets. One principal claimed, “The way principals keep their jobs in Atlanta is “they make targets”.”

Whistle-blowers were ridiculed and punished, while school staff who beat the exam targets were given cash bonuses (even the bus drivers and dinner ladies).

The governor’s investigators concluded, “Hall created an atmosphere that rewarded cheaters, punished whistle-blowers, and covered up wrongdoing” and that she “created a culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation” that had allowed “cheating – at all levels – to go unchecked for years.”

Dishonesty Is Endemic

It would be easy to explain the Atlanta story as a single event caused by a bad apple in a single industry.

But there are examples of cheating and lying in pretty much every industry. Policemen fiddle with their crime statistics, and doctors play tricks with their service levels.

If you work from home and your company uses “productivity monitoring software” to track your productivity, you can buy an electronic “mouse jiggler” to fool your employer that you are busy at your desk when you are putting the washing in. (I kid you not, Google it!). Dishonesty is endemic.

For advice on whether your employee could be a problem, read our article: How to Identify and Manage Toxic Employees

Managers Who Are Beaten Around the Head Routinely Pass the Beatings On

The main cause of all this dishonesty is an obsession with individual numerical targets. Managers who are beaten around the head if their teams don’t “hit the target” routinely pass the beatings on.

To avoid the pain, employees cheat. This is nothing new and happens at the loftiest levels. In 1979, the British economist Charles Goodhart criticized the monetary policy of Margaret Thatcher’s government. In his paper, Goodhart wrote:

“Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.”

That is a bit of a mouthful! Fortunately, his point has since been simplified to what has become known as Goodhart’s Law:

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

Or, to put it more prosaically, when a measure becomes a target, people will cheat to hit it. Goodhart’s law sounds dull, but as management insights go, it is gold dust.

For advice on spotting if your team leaders are obsessing over metrics, read our article: Are Your Team Leaders Too Busy Chasing Metrics?

When a Measure Becomes a Target, People Will Cheat to Hit It

If you use targets and supercharge them with a nice big incentive or the threat of a job loss in your organization, then I predict you will see the following behaviours:

Arguing About the Measure

Managers claim that the metrics aren’t sophisticated enough because their part of the business is “different” and “special” from everywhere else. They will also swear blind that the data is inaccurate or that the definitions are wrong.

Changing the Data

They “modify” the standards to make the numbers look better. They “stop the clock” or remove “exceptions” and “outliers”.

Productivity ratios miraculously lose hours from the denominator (surely you shouldn’t include long-term sick, jury duty, or training and…) whilst “completed tasks” mushroom in the numerator. (Who is to say that task wasn’t completed?)

Distorting the System

Like the teachers sitting the bright pupils next to those who struggle, there are plenty of ways to change your process to get the “right” answer. Call centre agents are the masters of this (it is the only thing they can do).

They transfer calls to hit handle-time targets or decline customer requests when they can’t see a cross-sale. [Insert your favourite story here.] We all know it happens!

Improving Performance

The fourth outcome is that the target incentivizes the agent to improve their performance. This is the one we are all hoping for, and that our HR colleagues assure us will happen. It is the most desirable outcome, but also the rarest.

★★★★★

Don’t Give Your Agents a Reason to Cheat!

What should you do instead? The answer is simple. Don’t give your agents a reason to cheat. Get rid of your individual targets and incentives. I am not advocating that you throw away all your measures.

That would be a foolish thing to do, but you use them as diagnostic tools to understand how your system is performing rather than sticks to beat your agents with.

If you want to improve your performance, you must change your thinking from “people management” to “system management”. (The system isn’t just your IT system. It is the environment your staff work in. It is your policies and procedures, your incentives, your recruitment process, the way you launch new products and all the myriad other things you do to manage your business.)

Your sales rates fall when you have a flood of disgruntled customers or your product doesn’t meet their needs. Your productivity numbers flounder when your agents aren’t authorized to answer queries and have to transfer calls, or the “computer says no”.

Fixing those problems will improve performance, rather than shouting at Sally or Steve! After all, the way to improve productivity is to take your foot off your agents’ necks and instead of asking “who caused that?” start worrying about “what caused that?”.

Then your agents won’t have a reason to cheat, and you can focus on real, not performative, performance improvement. They might even help you!

Written by: James Lawther, Director of Squawk Point Consulting, and author of ‘Managed by Morons’

If you are looking for more information to help manage your targets and employees, read these articles next:

Author: James Lawther
Reviewed by: Jo Robinson

Published On: 8th Jun 2026
Read more about - Call Centre Management, Agent Performance, Employee Engagement, Employee Experience (EX), James Lawther, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Leadership, Management Strategies, Metrics, Performance Management, Team Management, Top Story