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💡 Don’t measure just because you can
💡 Don’t measure just because you can
Daniele Catalanotto avatar
Written by Daniele Catalanotto
Updated over a year ago

Imagine working in a company where a robot looks at everything you do on your computer. You then get paid only for the “active work” that the robot sees. So doing some quick math on a piece of paper or thinking doesn’t get paid as the robot doesn’t see it.
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That kind of stuff already exists (1). And as community member Guy Martin (2) says:
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“This “productivity monitoring” tech is demoralising, dehumanising. And in the long-term, it’s ironically counter-productive.”
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It is like those hotlines that measure the number of calls per hour a support staff handles. Such numbers push employees to get to the next customer as quickly as possible. And that makes customers feel like cogs in a machine.
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Guy summarises this brilliantly. “Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean you should or that it even provides any insight.”
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So let me ask you this:

Which of your metrics stress employees or lower the customer experience?

Footnotes

(1) Jodi Kantor and Arya Sundaram (2022). The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score. The New York Times. Available at https://extra.swissinnovation.academy/nTmY accessed 20 October 2022.
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(2) Thanks to Guy Martin, who made me aware of the story that inspired this Service Design Principle in one of his Linkedin posts.


Go further

This principle comes from the book "Service Design Principles 201-300".

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