Measuring RTO

I’m the sort of person who has favourite Laws of Social Science. To be specific, my two favourite Laws of Social Science are Goodhart’s Law and Campbell’s Law.

To summarise them, Goodhart’s Law states that if a measurement is used as a goal, the meaning of that measure changes (usually for the worse). Campbell’s Law states that if a measurement is used as a goal then people will cheat to hit it.

I realise that I’ve possibly appeared somewhat dogmatic in recent months in response to increasing calls from organisations to their employees that they must make an appearance in offices for a specific number of days each week. These calls irk me because they are controlling and remove agency from grown adults. They also annoy me because often they are made by people who have an agenda and that agenda is driven by their large portfolios of commercial property. Yes, you, Alan Sugar.

Goodhart’s Law and Campbell’s Law give an insight as to why this “You must return to the office x days each week” will probably not work.

When organisations make such a policy, I’m assuming it’s from a place of good intent and that they want to improve the productivity of their office-based workforce.

The number of days in the office, however, is at best an input indicator for such a goal. It’s in no way a proxy for workforce productivity. And setting it as a goal, Goodhart tells us, will mean that a bad input measure will become even less meaningful.

Even worse, Campbell tells us that rather than becoming more productive, energy and creativity will be diverted from whatever it is that a business is there to do, and instead it will be spent on coming up with ways to make it look like people are “in the office” when in fact they are not. Stupid measures are met with an opposite and inverse energy to game the stupid measures.

So what to do?

Well, in a sane and rational organisation (yeah, I know), the starting point would be to define a hypothesis. Something like:

We think that if we get people to spend more time in one another’s physical presence we will be able to see their working productivity increase.

You would then think about ways in which you could encourage people to spend more time in one another’s physical presence to test the hypothesis, and even create some blind experiments to test to see if people being geographically remote but doing similar activities would have similar or different outcomes. I’ll leave the thorny issue of measuring knowledge worker productivity for you.

(It’s worth looking at this thread from Professor Liz Stokoe about the myth of the “gold standard” of in-person communication if you did want to define such experiments.)

You can then see what happens, and make further suggestions for how to improve productivity as a result, building on things that seem to work and knocking back those that don’t.

This is what a sane organisation would do.

Just for the avoidance of doubt, I’m writing this sitting in Equal Expert’s London office where I am working today and was here on Tuesday too. Yesterday I spent time with colleagues in a London conference centre. Tomorrow I will be working at home. Last week I was in for one day, the week before none.

I hope that I have the nous to know when in person is a sensible tool to use, and also when it is not. I imagine that most people do.