Productivity Metrics Often Create Waste
The moment you measure productivity, people start producing the metric instead of the result — and the gap between the two becomes pure, well-documented waste.
I build systems and dashboards for a living, which means I build the tools companies use to measure productivity. So I want to say something against my own product category: productivity metrics often create the waste they were meant to eliminate. The moment you measure productivity, you change behavior — and not always toward the result you wanted. People start producing the number instead of the outcome.
The cruel part is that the waste a bad metric creates is invisible on the dashboard. The dashboard is green. The number is up. And the actual work is quietly getting worse underneath it.
Why the conventional wisdom is wrong
The conventional wisdom says you cannot improve what you do not measure, so the path to higher productivity is to measure it and hold people to the number. But a metric is always a proxy for the thing you actually care about, never the thing itself. The moment the proxy becomes the target, people optimize the proxy — and the gap between the proxy and the real goal fills up with waste. You get more of the measurement and less of the result, dressed up as progress.
Measure tickets closed, and people close easy tickets and split hard ones to inflate the count.
Measure lines of code, and you get verbose, bloated code that is harder to maintain.
Measure hours logged, and you get hours logged — not value created.
Measure calls handled, and quality drops while the count climbs and customers come back angrier.
What is actually true
What is actually true is captured by an old observation: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. Productivity is the result you want, but you cannot measure it directly, so you measure a proxy. People are smart and incentives are real, so they optimize the proxy — often by doing things that hurt the actual goal. The metric goes up, the dashboard looks healthy, and the gap between the number and the truth becomes pure waste: effort spent producing a figure instead of a result.
This is not because people are dishonest. It is because they are responding rationally to what you chose to count. The waste is not a flaw in their character. It is a flaw in the metric, and you installed it.
What we see at TTGC
When we are asked to build reporting and productivity systems for clients, the dangerous request is "just give us a number to manage people by." We have seen what those numbers do. We have watched teams game ticket counts, inflate activity logs, and optimize a vanity metric while the work that actually mattered — the hard, unmeasured, valuable work — quietly got neglected because it did not move the number. So we now push clients to measure outcomes rather than activity, to use a small set of metrics as signals rather than targets, and to keep a human in the loop who can tell the difference between a good number and good work. The clients who chase a single headline productivity figure almost always create elaborate, well-documented waste. The ones who measure carefully and sparingly get the result.
How to measure without creating waste
Metrics are not the enemy. Targets dressed up as metrics are. A few principles keep the difference clear.
Measure outcomes wherever you can, not activity — the result, not the motion that is supposed to produce it.
Treat metrics as signals to investigate, not targets to hit; the number tells you where to look, not how people should behave.
Use a handful of balanced metrics so gaming one shows up as damage in another.
Keep human judgment in the loop, because no number survives contact with people trying to maximize it.
The honest take
Measuring productivity is not wrong, but measuring it carelessly is worse than not measuring it at all. The moment a metric becomes a target, people will produce the metric — and the gap between the number and the real result becomes waste you will struggle to even see, because the dashboard says everything is fine. So measure outcomes, keep your metrics few, treat them as signals instead of targets, and never let a green dashboard substitute for a look at the actual work. The number is not the goal. The goal is the goal.
Sources
Goodhart's Law — when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
McKinsey & Company — research on productivity measurement and the limits of activity-based metrics. mckinsey.com
TTGC — patterns across client transformation work.
