[bluGill]

Depends, do you want that to happen or not? You seem to be making an assumption this is good, but in some organizations this would be a bad thing to penalize. I'm not sure why you would do this in engineering, but it is important to acknowledge that this isn't a universal good and so maybe your company wants to discourage it for some reason.

Assuming you want people to help each other, you need to capture metrics on it. A few years back I had a metric of helping n people in a different department: I kept track of those interactions so I had something to report at the end of the year.

[TeMPOraL]

Was that your personal metrics? Metrics created for yourself are subject to less gaming because when you start lying to yourself about those, you will start to wonder why keep those metrics at all.

If that was a company-issued, top-down metric, I hope it wasn't defined literally as "helping n people in a different department", because that has enough wiggle room to sail an aircraft carrier through. The difficulty of creating a good metric here comes from the difficulty of defining what exactly does it mean, in company context, to "help other people" - and also what it explicitly doesn't mean.

[bluGill]

I had to report it to my boss. It was top down, but only a few interactions were required, and it wasn't reported farther up the chain. Because I had to report to my boss, he knew me well enough to judge if it was enough. It was just enough of a metric to ensure people looked for something to bridge a communication gap, without being hard enough that people tried to game it much.

[mikeash]

How would you capture those metrics? Requiring people to document all such interactions is impractical, and open to easy abuse.