Contents
The Cult of Metrics and the Illusion of Activity
Today, businesses love to measure everything. Managers implement complex dashboards, set rigid KPIs, and demand weekly productivity reports. However, often instead of the expected growth, the company gets chaos: employees look extremely busy, the numbers in reports flash green, but real clients leave, and the product stagnates.
Goodhart’s Law in Action
This phenomenon is perfectly described by Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” (Wikipedia). As soon as you tie bonuses or team performance evaluations to a specific number, people stop solving actual business problems. They start “hacking” the system, optimizing their work solely to hit that KPI.
How Teams Learn to “Hack” KPIs
When a reward system is built incorrectly, “optimization sabotage” occurs. Let’s look at the most common examples:
The Recruiting Illusion
If a specialist in a recruitment agency is evaluated by the number of offers sent or the volume of candidates quickly moved to the next funnel stage in an ATS (like PeopleForce), a disaster begins. The recruiter starts “spamming” irrelevant candidates and pressuring the hiring manager to close the position faster. The activity in the report is frantic, but the real business result is zero, as most of these candidates won’t even pass their probation period (Business.linkedin).
Fragmentation in Dev and PM
In project management and software development, the situation is analogous. If the success of a programmer or project manager is measured by the number of closed tasks in ClickUp or lines of code written, they start artificially inflating the backlog. A single complex feature is broken down into 10 micro-tasks just to show movement on the board. Architectural integrity suffers, and technical debt grows, but formally, the KPI is executed perfectly.
From Outputs (Activity) to Outcomes (Results)
To stop optimization sabotage, you must radically change your approach to measuring success.
1. Stop Measuring Outputs
Outputs are what you do (number of calls, lines of code, interviews conducted). Outcomes are what changes for the business because of your work (how fast a page loads, what percentage of new hires successfully passed onboarding and stayed after 3 months). Shift the team’s focus to Outcomes (Hbr).
2. Implement Paired Metrics
To prevent people from hacking one metric at the expense of other processes, use balancing. For example, if you measure “Time to Fill” for a vacancy, be sure to pair it with “Quality of Hire”—the percentage of those who passed the probation period. If a developer is evaluated on “Release Speed,” the paired metric should be “Number of Critical Bugs Post-Launch.” This forces them to think about the system as a whole (Atlassian).
3. Make Customer Pain the Main KPI
Metrics should reflect customer success. It doesn’t matter how many tasks the team closed if the end user doesn’t understand how to use the interface. Tie the work of every department to real value for the market.
Conclusion
Efficiency metrics are just a compass that helps you understand if the company is moving in the right direction. If you turn this compass into a whip for the team, be prepared for your employees to become geniuses of imitation. Evaluate people based on the problems they solved, not on how beautifully they filled out their reports.
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