I had breakfast with a client this week.  He was telling me that his organisation is now measuring staff performance every quarter and this necessitated fitting aspects of an employee’s behaviour into boxes on the appraisal template.  Predictably he felt that this was undermining the complexity of human beings as even if someone does not achieve a particular target number in one box he or she may be adding immeasurably to the organisation in some other way - eg relationships with colleagues, clients, staff morale, administration, etc.  I find the increasing focus over the last ten years on targets and measurement is demotivating for many people. It is also extremely time-consuming and many managers, whose main skill may well be in a technical expertise rather than in people-related activities, frequently procrastinate in carrying out appraisals.  This can culminate in the further demotivation of their direct reports, who perceive the procrastination as an indication that the manager does not take their personal development seriously.

 Yet governments, management consultants and HR departments continue to insist on treating people like machines that can produce x number of widgets in an 8 hour day.  In my view this undermines the richness of what it is to be human.  It also does not take into account how humans can think laterally and creatively so as to ‘tick the boxes’ but not achieve real progress - take as an example an NHS hospital who met the target of not having patients waiting in corridors by giving the corridor a Ward name!  Another example was that patients should not be allowed to wait on stretchers for a long period - so the wheels were taken off the stretcher and it was called a bed.  There are countless other examples of the futility of targets in education, the police force and in organisations as a whole.  They can limit thinking and over-ride practical common-sense by rewarding the wrong things.  An example of this was a police force who arrested not only the muggers but also victims of ‘have-a-go’ events in order to gain more points through achieving a greater number of (measurable) arrests in order to meet their targets.

I am not saying that targets should be completely discarded, only that they should be seen within a broader context so that other less tangible factors can be taken into account in measuring a person’s performance.   Even John Nash who invented Game Theory eventually came to see that measurable targets cannot be applied to all aspects of life - so why do we continue to do so?  People cannot be reduced to numbers: we are much more than that.