Monday, 6/4/2018
José Carones Azevedo,
Engineering and Management of Information System, member of the Association for Information
Systems - UM
Metrics are commonly more used by more and more
businesses, financial, governmental and educational institutions as the only
way to measure one’s performance. Is this point of view that it’s possible and
even desirable to use numerical indicators based on standardized data instead
of trusting the judgement of a trained professional the correct way to evaluate
someone’s performance? Isn’t it alarming that organizations use benefits or
punishments based on the comparison of one’s numbers that may or may not
consider any contextual factors inherent to that metric as a motivational bait?
It’s easy to think in cases that police are on
the hunt for traffic tickets, it’s something common and simple, but it
illustrates efficiently the picture I’m trying to paint. Metrics incentive one
to cheat the system. A police officer that must fill a traffic ticket quota, is
a lot more predisposed to forcefully find them. But the picture gets worse when
you think of a surgeon’s decision to refuse to operate on a patient with more
complex problems because it would be more likely that it would lower his
success tax and in consequence his reputation and credibility. The number of
professionals who choose to maximize this metrics in a way that doesn’t fit the
context of the organization where they work is likely way too high. As is
explained in these examples, the benefits may not just be monetary, such as a
payment for satisfactory performance, but good reputation, like academic evaluations
or social credibility.
Metrics can also influence an organization, in
the sense that they can become short sighted. A plausible scenario is an
organization that focus so much in the results that they should report on a
trimester that they exclude considerations about future consequences, in
example not considering the developing of staff, so the financial balance is
better, and in consequence better metrics. And that’s how entrepreneurship,
initiative and risk taking are killed off. Certainly, the American intelligence
agents that located Osama Bin Laden worked on the case during many years, and
in case their productivity would be measured at any point in time, it would be
a round zero, until that, month after month of work they achieved success. From
the point of view of these agent’s superiors, it was a substantial risk to
allow them to work on the case during years on end without any return. The
invested resources could have had no return, but it explains, that taking a
significant risk like this can be necessary to achieve remarkable success.
It’s problematic that when an organization
evaluates the performance of his worker by his metrics results against the
standards, what they are doing is incentivizing him to do nothing more than
what the metric evaluates, and the metric evaluates a given goal. But that
stops innovation, and what innovation is, is doing something that is not that
given objective in the way it’s supposed to. Innovating. Innovating requires
experimenting, and sometimes the result of experimenting is failure, but that
doesn’t mean that time is lost. The fact that metrics are many times
individual, decreases the sense of teamwork, the sense of working with a common
goal. Instead, it’s possible that it promotes a competitive environment, which
can be right in certain contexts, but when it comes to a team working with a
common goal, it degrades the social relations that motivate the cooperation
between workers which is certainly not the best path for organizational
efficiency.
Generally, what organizations mean to happen
when they impose a metric, is that a certain objective is achieved, but what
can happen is the opposite, that the objectives are modified to accomplish that
metric. An example is what I’ve experienced as a student, I’ve seen it happen
during my educational path. The phenome of “teaching by the test” which even
being certainly less prevalent on superior education, haunts basic and
secondary school, inflating the students results but deteriorating the students
learning.
Another negative point for the use of metrics,
is their intrinsic cost. The time spent compiling, organizing and processing
their results can be expensive.
In short, metrics act like
a paradox, they can be extremely beneficial, with their ability to easily control
a worker’s performance, but they can make someone work harder and more time in
activities that bring little value to the organization, even possibly affecting
their motivation. Organizations with the intention of making this system
functional, stopping manipulation attempts result of the systems of the
metric’s systems impositions, end up imposing even more rules that result in a
less efficient organization.
