Measuring

Presence, activity and output volume are captured continuously and predict little. Manager quality, whether people can speak up, and whether trajectory is visible predict a great deal and appear on no dashboard.

A Stanford study in Nature found no productivity drop under hybrid working and 33% lower turnover (peer-reviewed); Gallup finds remote workers logging about an hour less per day with steady output. Hours were never what was being purchased.

An activity score is built from input-device events, application categories set by default, and an idle threshold. It misses thinking, conversation and paper work by construction, and the work that scores highest is the most automatable. For a related reference, see read more.

Six things predict retention and none arrives automatically: turnover by manager, whether people can speak up, whether trajectory was discussed, feedback recency, internal movement, and departure clustering. Together they cost roughly two days a year for an organisation of a hundred.

Your own turnover data, cut four ways, answers more than any purchased research: by manager, by tenure, by date against events, and by whether you minded.

And seven things cannot be instrumented at all — a known blind spot being safer than a false reading.

• Activity Scores

  A productivity percentage is a count of inputs, not a measure of work. What the number is made of and how it is gamed.

• Your Own Turnover Data

  One afternoon with data you already hold, cut four ways. What each cut reveals, and the trap waiting in small numbers.

• Precision Is Not Accuracy

  Organisations measure attendance to the minute and manager quality not at all. The difference decides what a dashboard is worth.

• What Predicts Retention

  Six measurements that move with departures, none of them automatic, and roughly what each one costs to collect.

• Measuring the Manager

  The largest controllable factor in retention is the least assessed. Four measures, and why upward feedback usually fails.

• What a Dashboard Cannot See

  Seven things that decide whether a team works, none of which any system can capture, and how each becomes visible instead.

• What Presence Measures

  Attendance is the most tracked figure in most organisations and one of the least predictive. What it does and does not tell you.

For additional context on this topic, see Pixlr.