Case: Taras is fast and cuts corners

Before giving feedback on a number, read what's behind it. A rate tells you that something goes wrong; only the cases tell you what the person actually does, and feedback has to be about what they do.

At Klasna the numbers on Taras are clear. Over December and January he closed 726 tickets, 33.85% of the team's, with the fastest first reply, 10.5 minutes. But 9.50% of his tickets came back, and his satisfaction was 78.24% on 216 survey answers.

Two tempting shortcuts both fail. Praising the speed and mentioning the reopens lightly at the end is the sandwich again: he'll hear the praise and miss the rest. “Your reopen rate is too high” is no better: it names a number, not something he can do differently on Monday.

So pull the tickets themselves, all 36 that families reopened in January, and read each thread for the cause. That turns a rate into behaviors, and behaviors into a conversation.

Reading the cases is only half the work; the other half is sorting them by who controls the cause. Feedback is fair only about what the person can change.

At Klasna each of Taras's 36 January reopens got a cause from its thread. Three causes are habits he controls:

• answering only the first question in a message: 15 tickets;
• skipping the account check: 8;
• closing before the family confirms a fix: 4.

Together that's 15 + 8 + 4 = 27 of 36, or 27 / 36 = 75%. Three repeatable shortcuts explain three-quarters of the reopens.

The rest have different causes: 5 families came back with a new question, and 4 were platform faults that returned. Those would have happened whoever handled the ticket.

The split changes the conversation. “Your reopen rate” sounds like a judgment on the person; “three habits behind 27 tickets” is a short list of things to do differently.

Once causes are sorted, look for the single biggest one. Feedback works best when it asks for one change, not five, and the biggest cause is usually where one change does the most.

At Klasna it's answering only the first question in a message: 15 of Taras's 36 January reopens, 15 / 36 ≈ 41.67%. A family writes about a schedule change and a payment, gets a quick answer on the schedule, and writes again about the payment. The ticket comes back, the family waits twice, and someone answers a second time.

This one habit also explains the paradox in Taras's numbers: answering only the first question is exactly what makes his first reply so fast. Speed and reopens come from the same behavior.

That's useful for the conversation. The next step can be specific and small: re-read the message and tick off every question before closing. It costs a minute per ticket and targets the largest share of the problem.

Before the conversation, check each conclusion you're tempted to draw against the data. Only bring the ones it supports.

The January file supports three. Most reopens come from a few repeatable habits he controls: 27 of 36. Some reopens would have happened whoever handled the ticket: 9 were new questions or platform faults, and fairness means leaving them out of the feedback. His reopens also cost teammates time: 20 of 36 came back on someone else's shift, with 51 of the 88 extra replies.

That last point is the impact beyond families. Olha says it plainly: when his tickets come back on her shift, she answers them a second time, and it's not rare.

Two conclusions the data doesn't support. “Taras doesn't care about families” is a guess about character; nothing in a ticket thread shows what someone cares about. “Taras should be ranked last” turns one metric into a league table, and a ranking helps nobody fix anything.

A strong feedback conversation can say how big the improvement would be. It turns “do better” into a concrete, hopeful picture.

At Klasna, in January Taras closed 379 tickets and 36 came back: 36 / 379 ≈ 9.50%. Remove the 27 shortcut reopens and 9 are left: 9 / 379 ≈ 2.37%. That's below Olha's 4.09% over December–January, the steadiest coordinator on the team.

This is the strongest argument you have, and it's a hopeful one: the problem is three habits, not the person. Taras doesn't need to become someone else; he needs to answer every question, check the account and wait for the family to confirm a fix.

It also answers Iryna's worry. She called Taras the engine for the March peak and asked you not to slow him down. The fix doesn't slow him down; it stops the same tickets coming back, which frees time for him and for teammates.

Calling something a habit is a claim about a pattern, and a pattern needs more than one period. One month can be bad luck: a run of awkward tickets, an outage week, a family that writes three times about everything.

So before the conversation, check another month. At Klasna Taras's December reopen rate was 9.51%, almost exactly January's 9.50%. The pattern is steady across eight weeks, not one bad week. That's what entitles you to say “habit”, and it matches the rule from Feedback on behavior, not on character: a pattern needs several named cases.

The check works both ways. If December had been 3%, January would be a moment worth asking about, not a habit to correct, and the conversation would start with “what changed in January?”

The same caution applies to the fix. February's reopens by cause, looked at together on an agreed date, will show whether the habit is changing, far better than a single number.

How the feedback opens decides whether the person thinks or defends. The best opening starts from specific cases and asks for their view before any conclusion.

At Klasna, hold it in Taras's regular one-to-one, on video, with his topics first. Then: “Can we open two of your January tickets that came back? I'd like to hear what happened before you closed each one.” Open them together and ask.

If he gets defensive, stay on the tickets, not on him. Let him find the pattern himself: people own fixes they find. Then agree one next step, such as re-reading the message and ticking every question before closing, and a date to look at February's reopens by cause together.

Three openings to avoid. A ranking and a verdict (“your reopen rate is the worst on the team”). A sandwich (“you're our fastest, but you rush, though overall fine”). And hiding behind someone else (“Iryna asked me to talk to you about quality”), which disowns the feedback.

His speed deserves real praise, on its own, another day.

Expect one objection for sure: “If I check every question, my numbers drop, and Iryna watches the numbers.” It's a fair worry. People do what they think is measured.

Answer it with the team's standard, not with someone's authority. At Klasna: done means every question answered, the account checked, the fix confirmed. Iryna has said she'd rather have fewer tickets closed once than more tickets closed twice, but “Iryna said so” hides behind her, while a team standard is something everyone, Taras included, can hold to.

Then say how you'll look at it: reopens by cause, reviewed together on an agreed date, not a target on his rate. A target invites games; a review of causes keeps attention on the habits.

How it fits together: read the cases, sort what he controls, find the biggest habit, size the fix, check it's a pattern, open with the tickets and answer the numbers worry with a shared standard. In March the peak begins, Dmytro and Sofiia join, and the next module asks what you hand to whom.