Recently several Wells Fargo employees were fired for simulating keystrokes to indicate they were using their computers when they weren’t. The dreaded mouse jiggler strikes again! The fact that someone invented this and you can buy them on Amazon, and it has over 1200 reviews says something is wrong with how we monitor and measure.
It all goes back to the adage, “What gets measured gets managed”. It’s attributed to Peter Drucker, but the Drucker Institute says no. It’s one of those many phrases that sounds good, but in practice just isn’t true. And this isn’t new information. In 1956, V.F. Ridgeway published a paper entitled, “Dysfunctional Consequences of Performance Measurements”. The bottom line is that not everything that matters can be measured and not everything that can be measured matters. But still we try to measure things, thinking there is correlation in all of our activities. In the late 1970s, there was a study done on Strontium 90 fallout in the atmosphere and declining SAT scores. There was lots of data to prove something that wasn’t true.
Work Monitoring
In the early 20th century the time clock was born. You punched in when you got to work and you punched out when you were done. It was a step up from handwritten forms, but it still didn’t show what people were doing between card punches. Still, we polished and perfected the time clock into the geofenced, biometric, app-enabled, time-coded, shrine of time tracking that it is today. You still can’t tell what people are doing, but you do know what code to bill their time against.
Enter the supervisor to fill in the blanks about how workers are spending their time. This person looks over the work floor to count the butts in seats. If the seats are full, the work must be getting done. And if there are too many people to watch around the clock, simply have them send in daily reports of what they did that day. For good measure, they should also say what they are going to do the next day so we can compare. No one questioned whether it made sense, it was the normal way of doing things. That was until remote work came along.
Remote Monitoring
There are lots of advantages to remote monitoring in many disciplines. If you want to measure toxic gasses inside a volcano, remote monitoring is the way to go. If you want to know if a patient in the ER is still breathing. Remote monitoring wins again. When the Mercury Space program was started, NASA pulled out all the stops to protect the health of the astronauts. Their space suits didn’t just keep them alive in the vacuum of space, but they were built-in telemetry devices tracking all of the astronaut’s vital signs. On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard’s space suit recorded something no one had planned. After 8 hours of delays in launching, he peed his pants. Was it important to measure or even record this for the history books? It did reveal a design flaw when he shorted out some of the sensors, but other than that, probably not. It does bring up questions of privacy and ethical use of how data was used. It probably made sense at the time, but for the workplace, how much monitoring is even appropriate considering we are probably not measuring the right things.
Busy Work vs Deep Work
Busy Work and Deep Work are inversely proportional based on the level of trust in an organization. This brings us back to the mouse jiggler. Is this a way to cheat the system? Or is it a way to get things done despite micromanagement? Assuming the latter, then the wrong people were fired at Wells Fargo recently. Measuring the wrong thing will create bad behaviors. I’ve seen help desk staff close out tickets just to make their service levels. The fact that there was still a problem and a pissed-off customer had to open another ticket never figured into the equation. Call centers frequently disconnect waiting customers just to keep their wait times within acceptable ranges. When we measure the wrong things, people find ways around the system.
Deep work is harder to measure than busy work. That’s why managers often gravitate towards what is easy to justify their existence. Imagine some manager waking Edison or Einstein during one of their naps and telling them to get back to work. I sketch a lot of things out on paper, and I spend a lot of time on the phone. If you gauged my level of activity based on my mouse movements, it wouldn’t reflect what I was doing. Having me write up what I am doing to justify the fact that my mouse isn’t moving as much as someone thinks it should just waste everyone’s time and doesn’t address the problem – companies are measuring the wrong things.
Over the past 6 years, I have been slowly pushing an idea that is almost a reality. Measuring my activity on the project probably wouldn’t show much in the way of progress. There are two more approvals needed and then I estimate that it will save about $16M annually. Earlier this week I wrapped up another project to get something funded that was more phone calls than mouse clicks. The result was more than 6 figures. This is why we should measure outputs rather than activity.
New Metrics
I would like to throw out an axiom to think about. In the workplace, if something is easy to measure, it may not be worth measuring. Here are a few examples:
- Attendance
- Website hits
- Email open rates
- Time in / Time out
- Social media followers
- Time since the last mouse movement
- Standardized test scores
- Demographics of the population served
- Sick time used
- Calories Burned
- Gross Domestic Product
- Daily activities
All of these things are easy to measure but rarely tell you anything useful. We need to focus on measuring outcomes which are generally harder to measure and take longer to get useful information. Some may also be subjective, and require people to pay attention, rather than just looking at data. Here are a few examples:
- Program success
- Customer satisfaction
- client/staff retention rate
- Environmental sustainability
- Cost savings without a reduction in output
- Time savings without a reduction in quality
- New business generated
- Progress since the last milestone
Our new world of work ultimately translates to less traditional direct management interaction. For some, this translates into Return to Office pushes so all those easy things to measure, can be measured. If you’ve gotten this far, you hopefully realize they shouldn’t be measured in the first place. We need to set people (and our organizations) up for success, by measuring their success. If you focus on activities, everyone loses. If you focus on outputs, everyone wins.
