WorkLore

We hear this mantra a lot, mostly when talking of KPIs or OKRs, or other strategic objectives and the measures of progress against them. 

I was thinking about this when the Prime Minister was facing criticism for not attending the majority of Question Periods in the House of Commons. (I promise, this won’t be particularly political.)

Those who criticize say it is disrespectful to the electorate and the House. 

Those who support Carney’s absences point to his travel, trade deals and other critical nation and infrastructure building activities that take him away from Ottawa and Question Period. 

I would tend to fall within the latter category, but that’s partly because of my experience. Because I do think that sometimes the real priorities don’t look like what others think they should. 

I held a role a while back that was designed to be a collaborative bridge between my department and the other departments within the organization (and even a bit beyond). My boss was very hands off, spending our checkins talking about his own work and telling me to figure things out when I met roadblocks. 

Yeah, it wasn’t really a great relationship. 

My boss also listened to our finance person a lot, probably in part because their offices were right next door to each other and partly to keep tabs on our financial health. 

I heard from others that our finance person was frustrated that I wasn’t in my office on several occasions when he “popped” by with a question. 

So I was both surprised – and not surprised – when during my performance evaluation, I was critiqued for not being in my office. 

No mention of the fact that if I was in my office, I wouldn’t be meeting with people in other departments, you know, collaborating with them like I was supposed to. Just a poor evaluation because I wasn’t sitting at my desk all day (like, say, the finance person did). 

No measure of the number of collaborative proposals or even the number of projects that had been successfully launched as I built a new function within our department essentially single-handed. 

No. I was measured for how often my butt was in a chair. 

So measure what matters. If we only look at output (hours in a chair) and not at outcomes (proposals and projects), then we’re looking in the wrong direction, and I would argue that in HR, we often are looking in the wrong direction. 

What is measured matters and what matters should be measured. In operations, but also in human resources.