Del DeVries : When Works Invisible 2008-03

Invisible Work

An article in the WSJ today, "A Modern Conundrum: When Work's Invisible, So Are Its Satisfactions" has some interesting reflections on the idea of metrics. Specifically, measuring what has been accomplished in information centric business culture. A few quotes from the article:

In the information age, so much is worked on in a day at the office but so little gets done. In the past, people could see the fruits of their labor immediately: a chair made or a ball bearing produced. But it can be hard to find gratification from work that is largely invisible, or from delivering goods that are often metaphorical. You can't even leave your mark on a document in increasingly paperless offices. It can be even harder trying to measure it all. That may explain why to-do listers write down tasks they've already completed just to be able to cross them off.

Companies should create meaningful short-term goals. Instead, "managers create all sorts of surrogate measures that they can measure, like PowerPoint slide counts and progress charts,"

Jon Williams once worked in an auto-claims department where the number of new-claim calls, which could take a half hour, were tallied with the same weight as brief reminder calls to customers. Even so, his greatest sense of achievement was transforming an initially angry and frustrated customer into someone who was satisfied and even laughing. "That wasn't measured at all," he says.

The article is a good reminder that metrics are relevant and important to a business. But possibly more important is the human side -- what are we engaged in that gives a sense of purpose and accomplishment?

Reference: CUBICLE CULTURE By JARED SANDBERG "A Modern Conundrum: When Work's Invisible, So Are Its Satisfactions", WSJ, 2/19/2008, Page B1 Link to article online

_2008-02-19

Tags: metrics - information - GtD

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A ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.

Friedrich Engels

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