Don’t Let Data Manage Your Workforce — That’s Your Job

During the Industrial Revolution, Frederick Winslow Taylor used time and motion studies to find the “one best way” to do tasks, leading to the assembly line. Companies found they could ramp up efficiency and growth by breaking down production into simple tasks.

Today, businesses still carry this efficiency-centered mindset, but even Taylor would be shocked at the lengths managers go to measure and monitor work. Rather than focus on workers’ results, the advent of technology brought systems to measure, track, analyze, and even shame workers’ activity. And this focus on monitoring activity can cause people to lose focus of their true goals and work to influence the data.

The endless quest for greater productivity creates managers obsessed with data — and a single-minded focus on data can drive good employees away and lead to undesirable behavior. It’s time to change our approach and start emphasizing employees as humans, not as number-producing machines.

When Data Takes Over

Clearly, businesses need to measure and track key indicators to gauge success. But many companies take monitoring to an extreme with unnecessary surveillance and control systems.

Disneyland’s hotels have a scoreboard-like monitor that displays workers’ speed, which employees call the “electronic whip.” Chicago’s WaterSaver Faucet Co. was reported to be limiting bathroom breaks to two per day. To enforce the new standard, it even installed a card-swiping system on the bathroom door to monitor restroom use.

These are some of the more overt monitoring systems, but businesses of all sizes and across all industries implement similar methods of control. Engineering labor standards, schedule adherence systems, time and attendance software, labor analytics, point-of-sale systems, and the relentless pursuit of KPIs all illustrate management’s obsession with monitoring performance.

Tracking minute levels of activity overshadows the one thing that truly matters — results — and only hurts employees. It communicates that leaders don’t trust the very people they chose to hire and assumes people lack integrity, are fundamentally lazy, and are incapable of directing their own behavior.

Just about every company claims to value its employees, but monitoring systems belittle and disrespect them. Employees can see the disconnect between the “values” poster on the wall and leadership’s actions. I’m sure many Enron employees scoffed at the “Vision and Values” statement that claimed, “We work with customers and prospects openly, honestly, and sincerely… Ruthlessness, callousness, and arrogance don’t belong here.”

Replacing Fear With Trust

If your organization has fallen into a data daze, it’s time to snap out of this mindset and take a more humanized approach to management. You can accomplish this by building a high-trust culture.

The benefits of an environment where workers are treated with trust and respect are enormous: higher morale, dramatic declines in voluntary turnover, reduced absenteeism, lower employee theft, fewer accidents, and higher levels of productivity. Employees happily strive to meet and even exceed the established standards because they feel valued. Ironically, these measures of success are the motivation behind the draconian monitoring systems, but a high-trust environment will actually drive the metrics you want.

Make the transition to a trusting culture by adopting positive assumptions and giving your employees creative control over their roles. Great leaders sincerely believe their employees have integrity, work hard toward company objectives, and are capable of completing their tasks. Remember: Your assumptions about others drive your behavior, which in turn impacts employee behavior, so have some faith in your people.  

Workers who feel vulnerable — whether they believe their job is on the line or don’t feel trusted — will not be focused on maximizing their contributions at work. They act out of fear, not from a desire to contribute and reach company goals. It’s up to leaders to move beyond claims that they trust workers and start behaving like it. You can demonstrate trust in employees by equipping them with necessary tools and resources, holding regular team meetings to share information with them, and creating opportunities to share their knowledge and exercise untapped skills.

A culture of trust encourages employees to buy into a company wholeheartedly by giving them control over important decisions. It puts ownership of work squarely on the shoulders of those who need to get it done.

By operating from positive assumptions, showing employees you value and trust them, and involving employees in key decisions, you will reach high-performance status while staying true to basic human values. And that’s a promise those monitoring systems will never be able to deliver on.