I disagree. Someone who's always getting Slacked with requests and keeps unblocking people won't be doing the work you're measuring, but they're helping 20 people do their work in half the time.
People who get unblocked by Pat and as a result accomplish their work are very likely to talk about the latter and forget/not mention the former when it comes to performance review time.
Yes, and not because they don't care about Pat, but because they don't see the other timeline where Pat didn't help and it took them a week to figure it out (or wait for Pat to spot their issue).
This seems pretty unlikely to surface. Saying "oh you do that by doing these 3 things" in Slack, or going off and fixing a broken thing in a test environment, might save someone else hours or days, but they won't report somewhere "this person saved me hours", particularly if it happened 3-12 months ago (whatever the review cycle is). Combing through emails and commits is also just pretty unlikely to happen.
* The impact is actually much smaller than you initially think
* You're not vocal enough about that, or that's just one-off thing (high performers usually pretty consistent)
* You're in a bad environment where good work isn't getting recognized
I've did exactly that and my coworkers keep know how that benefits them, so it's not impossible. Anyway, being vocal on what you're doing or achieve in remote work is also crucial, if the environment cannot discover your achievement easily.
I think the point is that saying "there's only one parameter to measure" elides all the difficulties of measuring the different ways people can be effective in the workplace.
>here'll be work record somewhere, either emails, commits (if they're software engineers) or system audit trails.
Sure, it'll be somewhere. Will a manager bother looking around for that when it comes time to layoff? Do they even care about that to begin with? Are they even close enough to the product where they bother to look at something like a commit log? Half may not even look at the dang Jira points they keep forcing teams to keep up with.
It comes down to care, and to be frank (in my experiences) almost no manager cares enough to take that time. They have a lot of other stuff on their plate, after all. They aren't rewarded for retention, they don't necessarily get punished if the companies underperforms as long as they can rationalize a scapegoat. why try to retain these low key "glues"?
>if you ask those 20 people during performance review, it'll clear as day.
My performance reviews tended to be personal, in my experience. a skip manager/director may ask about my direct lead, but other than that I can't recall ever calling someone out (good or bad) during one.
It comes down to the same metric, are those managers/directors going to take the time to ask everone about who they think is an unsung hero?
Moreover if you ask those 20 people during performance review, it'll clear as day.