If you passed me driving on the A34 to work the other day, you could have witnessed me shouting at the radio. “For goodness’ sake,” I said (or words to that effect), “these business people need to get real.”
My outburst was because there was a discussion about the “need” to monitor employees when they are working from home. The radio segment had been triggered by a newspaper report about staff being kept on day-long video calls to make sure they were actually working. That report was followed by an article on the political website “Guido Fawkes”, which ranted about civil servants not being monitored when they worked from home.
The desire for monitoring those who work at home comes from the notion that measuring inputs is important. It is not. Indeed, it is one of the worst things to measure. It’s easy to measure how many hours an office worker sits at their computer screen. You can also easily count the number of words they type. But they could spend every working hour typing thousands of words of complete and utter garbage. The measurement of the inputs is useless.
Similarly, I was at a meeting recently where we were proudly told that the company achieved an open rate for its emails of more than two-thirds. But that is an input measure. The output of those opened emails could easily be, “Oh, that’s not important,” and then press the delete key. What you really want to know is the number of conversions of those emails. How many people became customers, and for how long did they remain customers? Telling me they opened the email tells me nothing.
So, why are people measuring inputs? Because it is easy, and you can draw lovely charts and graphs that make it look impressive. Measuring conversion rates from emails, for example, requires complex analysis, so it gets put into the “too difficult” pile of things to do. The same is true for people working from home. Measuring their outputs is challenging because they are not in the office.
Now, new research from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, suggests that there is even greater complexity to measuring outputs rather than inputs. The theory from this research suggests that the items many businesses measure, such as the bottom line or Key Performance Indicators, are rooted in the dynamic relationships between employees. Measuring a particular KPI is only half the story. You need to consider the interpersonal relationships to get an accurate picture of what is going on in your business. The researchers argue that you cannot truly understand the effectiveness of an organisation through measurement alone. You need to understand how relationships between people contributed to those measurements.
I’d hazard a guess that if you were to force your staff to work on an all-day video call so you could measure their input, you’d soon find that their relationship with you deteriorates, along with their outputs due to reduced motivation. Trying to measure the wrong thing is likely to make things worse, rather than better.
In one of my lectures, I have a slide that displays the most frequently occurring items in reports from marketing departments. Then I ask students to work out the connection between the items on the list. After a bit of discussion, they realise that the most popular measurements are the ones that are easy to do. The factors that a good marketer really needs to understand involve complex analysis of outputs, not inputs.
But it is not just marketers who do the easy stuff in preference to what matters. Sales teams do the same thing. They record “number of visits”, “length of calls” and other very easy to measure items. But what they really need to measure is the depth of the relationship with each customer, the brand and the salesperson, because that is what will indicate future sales potential better than anything else.
Every organisation depends on its outputs to succeed. Measuring the inputs is easy. However, if we focus on measuring them, we risk altering relationships that, in turn, impact the outputs that matter. Analysing interpersonal relationships in the office may be the most crucial measure to focus on.
