Two management clichés stand out starkly in modern organizational culture - and they're always at-odds:
- "You can’t value what you don’t measure."
- "What gets measured, gets managed."
While seemingly simple, these phrases capture a fundamental paradox about the way businesses handle—or mishandle—a vital resource: their employees.
The Invisible IT Ops Teams
Let's consider the first assertion: "You can't value what you don't measure." Many organizations suffer from significant blind spots. Managers often intuitively understand that an employee adds value, but they don't bother to figure out how to quantify or track that employee's contributions. The rationale is simple yet flawed—if you're not directly measuring it, how do you truly recognize the worth of someone's efforts?
In one way, it's altruistic to "trust" employees to be contributing and creating value. Yet, in another way, this measurement gap often leaves organizations undervaluing critical contributors. Consider IT and Ops, for instance. Many IT professionals tirelessly maintain security, keep on-prem and cloud infrastructure running smoothly, and prevent catastrophes before they become noticeable. Yet, because these preventative measures rarely make headlines or stand out on performance reports, their value remains obscured from the organization. Consequently, management can take this quiet, competent excellence for granted. Over time, undervaluation becomes demoralization, and companies may lose their best, most reliable talent.
When organizations don't track or measure outputs effectively, they rely heavily on visible yet superficial indicators—like how vocal someone is in meetings, or how quickly emails get responses. Such superficial indicators tell us very little about true productivity or strategic contributions, creating significant blind spots for management.
When Organizational Failure to Measure Value Turns to Surveillance
Now, let's flip the scenario with the second phrase: "What gets measured, gets managed." This captures another side of organizational dysfunction—the obsessive overreaction to measurement, and measuring the wrong things. While measurement is essential, its misuse or overuse can breed toxicity in workplace culture. In 2025, employee surveillance has become an increasingly troubling norm. Organizations deploy intrusive monitoring tools, capturing keystrokes, mouse movements, time spent in apps, and even facial expressions via webcams. Ostensibly, these systems aim to boost productivity and reduce wasted time. In practice, however, they erode trust, morale, and autonomy.
Ironically, excessive measurement doesn't typically improve genuine performance. Instead, it distorts it. Employees, aware they're constantly watched, shift their behavior toward what's monitored—not necessarily toward what's meaningful or valuable. If mouse movement is measured, employees will keep their cursor moving. If response time to emails is tracked, inboxes are cleared at lightning speed, but thoughtful, strategic responses might diminish. The pressure to conform to arbitrary metrics leads to performance theater rather than genuine productivity: employees can begin to be performative and inauthentic with their managers, and with each other.
The emphasis on measurement becomes more about control than empowerment, micromanaging trivial aspects of work life while neglecting genuinely important outcomes—such as creativity, innovation, and collaborative effectiveness.
Striking the Right Balance
Organizations must find a middle path between neglectful blindness and obsessive monitoring. Measurement should not be a blunt instrument wielded indiscriminately but rather a finely tuned tool designed thoughtfully and transparently. The goal isn't to measure everything employees do, but rather to selectively measure outcomes aligned with strategic priorities and values.
Effective measurement practices respect employee autonomy, trust their professionalism, and recognize qualitative contributions. For instance, managers could emphasize regular check-ins focused on understanding challenges, recognizing unseen contributions, and capturing nuanced feedback. Moreover, modern performance assessments could integrate self-reporting, peer feedback, and qualitative reviews that appreciate diverse forms of value creation beyond mere numbers.
Ultimately, meaningful measurement should empower employees by providing clarity around expectations and recognition for real achievements, rather than simply exerting surveillance or control. Organizations that achieve this balance cultivate healthier workplace cultures, retain high-performing employees, and drive genuine organizational excellence.
In the delicate art of management, knowing what—and how—to measure remains crucial. The journey forward requires a deeper understanding that: not everything of value is immediately measurable, and not everything measurable is inherently valuable. Navigating this paradox successfully is perhaps the ultimate measure of enlightened management.
My Recommendations for A More Balanced Approach To Measuring Value
1. Choose Meaningful Metrics
The first step is to acknowledge that all metrics aren’t created equal. Some data points are more reflective of true performance than others. Meaningful metrics tend to correlate strongly with the real goal of an activity—be it revenue, customer satisfaction, quality improvements, or employee engagement.
2. Reduce Invasive Monitoring, Aim Instead for Visibility Without Micromanagement
A healthy measurement culture is one that promotes visibility into outcomes without devolving into micromanagement of the process. As a general rule, good measurements answer:
2a. What happened? (Outcome/Result)
2b. Why did it happen? (Insights and Root Causes)
2c. How can we do better? (Action)
Focus on end results more than exactly how someone arrived at them. For instance, if a software developer commits fewer lines of code but delivers robust, well-tested functionality on schedule, that’s success. Counting lines of code might be the easiest stat to gather, but it’s rarely correlated to true productivity or the final product’s quality.
3. Pair Metrics with Trust
Metrics should enhance the employee-manager relationship, not replace it. Trust and open dialogue remain key to any healthy work environment. Rather than installing keystroke loggers, managers could set up weekly one-on-ones to review progress, discuss roadblocks, and explore new ideas. The idea is to let employees know why measurements exist and how those measurements will be used to improve systems—not punish or hyper-monitor them.
When employees feel that metrics are used to support and develop them, rather than to catch them out, they will be more likely to engage positively with the process. The difference between an oppressive metric culture and a supportive one often comes down to the tone set by leadership.
4. Continually Refine and Evolve the Approach
Even if a company starts measuring the “right” things, those metrics can grow stale over time. The things that matter can change as technology or customer needs shift.
The best organizations take a dynamic approach, reevaluating their measurement systems at regular intervals. They ask:
• Are these metrics still aligned with our strategic goals?
• Have we discovered new forms of value we should capture?
• Are we inadvertently pushing employees toward short-term stats at the expense of long-term gains?
By making the measurement process iterative, you can pivot as soon as you realize a metric is leading the team astray, or if better, more telling data becomes available.
The Takeaway - Fostering a Culture of Accountability And Trust
Leaders set the tone, plain and simple. Executives, directors, and managers who recognize that it’s not about punishing or prying will focus on aligning measurements with the business’s vision and shared values. This includes both championing the spirit of transparency (so employees know what’s being measured and why) and actively discouraging overreaches like 24/7 monitoring.
Leaders who find the sweet spot maintain accountability without sacrificing employee trust and well-being. They demonstrate that measurement is a means to improvement, not an end in itself.
Measurement, handled judiciously, can empower employees to articulate their contributions. When you can tie your work to specific, quantifiable benefits—reduced overhead costs, faster project turnaround, higher user satisfaction—you become more visible and valued in the organization. This fosters a sense of ownership and pride.
Bottom line: more C-Suites and boards need to cultivate a nuanced understanding of how their companies operate! And then act to identify the core value drivers in your employees' work—and measure them clearly but responsibly. Then engage in open dialogue around the data, helping teams understand how they’re performing and empowering them with insights.
In an era when data-driven decision-making is celebrated, it’s worth remembering that data is not an end in itself. The point of tracking performance, productivity, or any form of work output is to enhance the collaboration, recognition, and continuous improvement that make for successful teams in a business. Measuring in the open, not via surveillance, is the best way to get metrics and keep trust. Lose trust, and you might as well forget it.
Orgs that embrace measurement for the visibility it brings, but remember the real goal is to discover and amplify genuine value—which isn't always made obvious by the latest hot tracking technology. By mindfully deploying the right metrics—and rejecting the corrosive urge to micromanage or surveil—we create workplaces that honor people’s contributions, build trust, and drive accountability for real innovation.