What to measure about your team, and what measuring it does to them

Every tool that sells itself on visibility eventually offers the same thing: a way to see what your people are doing. Screenshots on an interval. A score built from keystrokes. A dashboard ranking the team by hours logged. The pitch is always that you cannot improve what you do not measure.

The pitch is half right, which is what makes it hard to argue with. You do need numbers. The question nobody asks is what a particular number does to the person it is about.

Measuring changes the thing measured

A number attached to a person is not a thermometer. Once someone knows they are ranked by hours logged, hours get logged. Once activity is scored, mice move. The measurement stops describing the work and starts describing the response to being measured, and the two look identical on a chart.

This is not a claim about honesty. Reasonable people manage their own numbers, because being seen badly is expensive and being seen well is cheap. The tool created a second job and everybody quietly took it.

Some numbers do not have this problem

The difference is not how precise a number is. It is whether it describes work or describes a person.

How long a project took, against what you quoted, is about the project. Nobody has to defend it and it is nobody’s score. It tells you something you can act on: quote differently, scope differently, or stop taking that kind of work.

How many tasks each person closed is about people. It rewards whoever picks small work and punishes whoever takes the hard thing that took three weeks and mattered most. The number is real and the conclusion drawn from it is usually wrong.

Same shape, different subject. Work is a fair thing to measure. People, mostly, are not.

What is actually worth knowing

Which projects made money and which did not. Not for blame, but because it is the only way to price the next one better.

Where work is stuck, and on what. Usually it is waiting on a client and nobody has counted the days. The useful version of this points at a blockage rather than at a person.

What is about to go over. A budget crossed halfway through is a conversation you can still have. Crossed at invoicing, it is an apology.

None of these requires knowing when somebody was at their desk.

The test

Before adding a measurement, ask who reads it and what they do next. If a manager reads it and forms an impression of a person, it will be gamed, and you will have taught your team to manage their appearance instead of their work.

If whoever is doing the work reads it and changes what they do next, it is worth having. That is not surveillance. It is information arriving in time to be useful.

We build Projectous on that line, which is why it will never do screenshot monitoring or activity scoring, and why the first thing it shows anyone is their own work rather than somebody else’s.