Most organizations are fantastic at measuring people. They define metrics, create dashboards, schedule reviews and doggedly track targets. Labour time, outcomes, utilisation rates and KPIs may all represent productivity. As an outsider looking in, it seems like performance is a tightly-scripted process.
However in spite of all this measurement, many organisations wrestle with the same enduring issues: work feels transacted not deep; teams are ripped, outcomes fall shy and high performers burn out. That raises an uncomfortable question: if you’re so good at measuring, why does productivity still fail?
The answer is simple, if not easy: it’s far easier to measure people than to design work.
The Comfort of Measurement
Measurement feels reassuring. Numbers give the illusion of control. When leaderships can look at charts, scores and ranks then there is this air of objectivity to how performance are being managed.
Most organisations invest heavily in:
- Individual performance metrics
- Time and activity tracking
- Output-based targets
- Review and appraisal frameworks
These are well-known systems, scalable and easy to standardise. They also shift responsibility downward. When things don’t work out, the temptation is to assume that the problem is one of effort rather than that of how work itself is organized.
Why Measurement Rarely Fixes Productivity
The issue with measurement is that it’s not bad but it’s insufficient. Deciding what to do with them doesn’t magically make work flow better through an organisation.
People who never work on bad design suffer too. Responsibilities are fragmented, dependencies are muddy, priorities change frequently and decisions lag. There, quantity often serves as a catalyst of symptoms rather than causes.
People are rated, coached and pushed harder, yet the underlying friction that was holding you back is allowed to fester.
Work Design: The Secret to Productivity
Designing work is deciding how jobs are arranged, how tasks are allotted and how decisions course through the organisation. “An ideology of effort dispensates or multiplies,” he said.
Badly performed work often rears its ugly head as:
- Constant context switching
- Excessive coordination and handoffs
- Unclear ownership and accountability
- Work pending approvals and no Progress.
None of these problems is addressed by better measurement. They require intentional design.
Why It’s So Much Easier to Make Decisions About Someone Else’s Work
Unlike measurement, work design makes organisations uncomfortable in the face of inconvenient truths. It forces leaders to question structures, practices and decision rights that have been part of the company for years.
The design of work at its best raises other questions that are harder to answer:
- Who truly owns this outcome?
- Where’s work slowing? And why?
- Which ones are adding value, and which are just there because of repetition?
- Which decisions should get made closer to the execution?
These three questions challenge hierarchy, routine and control. As a result, many organizations tend to measure the people instead.
When Measurement Becomes a Distraction
Over-measurement can actively harm productivity. When people are judged based on narrow measures like these, they will optimize for the metric and not for the goal we actually want to accomplish. Partnerships are hurt, risks are shunned, and short-term results trump long term value.
Work in those places… work becomes performance. The activity picks up, but the influence does not. Teams cross fingers to prove they are productive, instead of simply being productive.
Measurement is then distracting from the real work of improvement.
The Human Toll of Poor Work Design
When work is poorly designed, people absorb the waste. They work late, patch over gaps and bend around broken processes. Initially, this looks like commitment. It eventually demoralizes and alienates people.
It is the high performers who start feeling this pressure first. They are given more work, with more complexity and more ambiguity. Eventually, they crash or break down or leave — not because they cannot handle the job but because it’s impossible to keep at that pace.
Moving Its Gaze from People to Work
Productivity increasing organizations are those that stop looking at individuals and start focusing on a better system of work.
This means paying attention to:
- How work flows across teams
- Where decisions get delayed
- How priorities get made (and remade)
Whether the functions are such that roles can be designated or muddied
Good design naturally leads to better performance. This creates a mentality where measurement is supportive, not punitive.
A Model of Better Work Design
Good work Places have some things in common.
- Clear ownership of outcomes
- Fewer handoffs and dependencies
- Decision-making authority aligned with responsibility
- Procedures that create, rather than minimize friction
People are not needed to keep an eye on such systems. Productivity does not manifest in hours, productivity shows up in results.
How Sifars Approaches Productivity Differently
We believe at Sifars that problems of productivity are rarely problems with people. They are design problems.
Shaping work: an examination of the ways in which we divide up and structure work, make decisions and design systems that do – or don’t – support performance.
We’re dedicated to helping leaders go beyond just measurement to intentional work design that drives clarity, pace and sustainability.
Conclusion
It will always be easier to measure people than it is to design work. It’s quicker, it memorizes and it disrupts less. But it is also less powerful.
After all, real productivity gains accrue from deliberately shaping environments in which it’s easy to do good work and hard to do bad work.
Work designIf organisations can get the work design right, then individuals don’t have to be pushed.
They perform.
If your company monitors performance closely but still finds productivity lagging, the problem may not be effort — it may be how work is constructed.
Sifars enables organisations to reimagine the design of work, flow of decisions, and execution models so that effort translates into real impact.
👉 Chat to us about how stronger work design can reboot sustainable performance.
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