Carragee Consulting

What gets measured gets done

This reminds me of when I first graduated from college and had health insurance that covered $25 of my gym membership if I went 12/month. I was already on a rowing team and I only used the gym for the pool to train for Tris so sometimes I would go and just sit in the hot tub.

Now with heart rate monitor watches and pedometers companies can give you “credit” for other activities that promote good health and therefore lower their expected insurance costs, but it’s still a proxy for what they’d ideally measure and you could game those metric too (e.g. put the watch on your kid.).

In the case where managers want to develop their employees the goal is so broadly defined that it more or less defies measurement – same with “culture building”. Either you can’t measure those objectives in the time interval where they drive results or you have an attribution problem for cause and effect.

Metric definition is a key task when you’re figuring out how to align strategy to execution.

[the above reflection was in response to Nick Bloom’s post, quoted below]

“A very 2023 start-up – a badge-swiping app for folks with RTO mandates that don’t want to come in. The app hires somebody to drive by, pick-up your badge, go to your office, swipe in and out, and then drop it back at your place. Uber for RTO badge swipes 🙂

This highlights the issue with badge-swiping mandates. Employees do their best to find work-arounds, defeating the objective.

Some firms have suggested a better solution – include meaningful “training and development” sections on performance reviews. The reason for badge swiping mandates is to force folks into the office with the aim of improving mentoring and learning. But why not directly evaluate mentoring and let employees figure out the best way to achieve this? Back in McKinsey my managers were assessed on “Developing Talent” and it provided a strong incentive for them to train-me. I learnt a lot quickly (although definitely not painlessly).

I would suggest firms worrying about WFH mentoring and training directly address that. Include metrics on mentoring and training in performance reviews and consider letting employees figure out how best to achieve this.” – Nick Bloom, LinkedIn