What does the size of the company matter? If 5% of the workforce in a 100 person company slacks off, vs 5% in a 50k person workforce, why is should policy be any different for the 50k workforce?
If you're implying the percentage of slackers scales non linearly as the size of a company grows then I'd love to see some research to back that up, as I'd be genuinely interested if that were the case.
One possibility is that as the number of slackers grows, the amount of damage that they can do increases at a greater-than-arithmetic rate, particularly if they tend to cluster together.
For example, if 5% of a company overall is composed of slackers, but 25% of their customer support department are slackers, they may do outsized damage.
" Fundamentally, everyone wants to do a good job (the statistical outliers who do not follow this are not worth focusing policy on)"
You have just said you should focus a policy on getting rid of them. I agree with this, but it goes against what the article just said to do.
I posit this is because he does not have a large enough company to have enough slackers that he needs to deal with them systematically, and instead can simply deal with them on a one-off basis.
If you're implying the percentage of slackers scales non linearly as the size of a company grows then I'd love to see some research to back that up, as I'd be genuinely interested if that were the case.