It’s Really, Really Hard to Measure Work Performance

Act Accordingly

Imagine that you start a small restaurant in your town. At first, it’s a one-person show: you are the cook, the cashier, the marketer, and the janitor. But after a while, business picks up and you decide to hire someone to help clean the dishes. You’re still busy with all the other work you had before, but at least you don’t have to worry about scrubbing plates.

At first, things are great - you have more hours in the day to get things done and the new employee is punctual and busy. But then you get a bad review from a customer about their utensils being dirty. You decide to observe your new employee more closely, but it seems as though they are doing their job well. So you relax a bit and weeks go by. 

Then, you get another bad review from a customer complaining that their plate had not been cleaned at all. This review includes a picture, so you decide to politely confront your employee and show them the evidence. But they claim the customer simply took a photo of their plate after they had eaten their meal and that the plate had been clean when it was served. 

You decide to put off some of your other duties and work exclusively in the kitchen alongside your employee the next couple of days to put the matter to rest. You spend time inspecting plates, utensils, and cups a couple times per day, but all of the items you inspect are clean. Despite this, you get another review from what appears to be a new and different customer about a dirty plate.

Even When the Work is Obvious, Measuring Performance Isn’t

Here we have an example of a work task that is very easy to evaluate. Most people are likely to agree whether or not a plate is dirty or clean. Despite this, it’s unclear what to do in this situation. Your employee is punctual and appears to be doing their job. But you can’t watch them every second of the day and so you can’t be 100% sure that they aren’t shirking their work when you aren’t looking. It could also be the case that your dishwasher is partially broken, or that some dishes have lost their enamel coating and so hold onto food scraps despite being washed. Finally, you could just have some very picky customers who see a tiny fleck of pepper on their plate and fly off the handle about it being disgustingly dirty.

The world is complicated, employers have limited time to assess performance, and even when the work should be easy to measure, human behavior complicates the picture.

Now imagine that instead of a single dishwasher working in a restaurant you own and operate, you employ 10 people at a digital ad agency. Two are artists, two are salespeople, two run ad campaigns, two are project managers, and two are software engineers. Half of the team works remotely, the other half comes into the office 3 days a week. Let’s assume that you have professional experience in sales, but not in the other disciplines.

How would you decide who was doing well and who wasn’t?

Let’s make it even more difficult and assume that you are running an organization of 500 people with many layers of management between you and the employees doing the day-to-day work. How would you know if the line employees are performing well? Would you trust your senior leaders? Would you take the time to speak with direct team managers on a regular basis? 

How to Measure Performance When You Can’t

The point is that it is really, really, really hard to evaluate whether someone is doing a good job or not. As a result, most employers and managers use a lot of signals to decide who to hire, who to promote, and who to fire. Many of those signals aren’t really related to job performance. For instance, if you are punctual, visually healthy, outwardly polite, responsive, and consistent, you’re probably a top 50% employee already. Note that none of those traits is “producing good work” or “being good at the thing you’re hired to do.” Just nailing the basics goes a long way towards convincing other people and your boss that you are effective.

The other big category that bosses use to determine the performance of employees is what other people say about them. If you have the baseline professional skills worked out (see above), there’s a fair chance that the difference between being promoted and being ignored comes down to how well you can get other people to sing your praise. You might think that this is unfair work politics - after all, shouldn’t the quality of your work speak for you? Hardly. 

It takes effort to get others to speak well of you. And if you are successful at doing that, you’ve demonstrated a very important and valuable skill: influencing other humans. Especially among knowledge workers, people who can do that are more valuable to the organizations that employ them.

What can you do with this knowledge? Nail the basics. Don’t be fooled by increasingly informal workplace culture: punctuality, responsiveness, and literally just showing up are hard behaviors to display consistently. Invest in those behaviors. After you’ve mastered them, invest in influencing other people to recommend you to your boss. 

Mastering basic professionalism is a huge competitive advantage and can lead to significant career advancement, even if you aren’t the best dishwasher in the world and occasionally miss a plate or two.