The key facts
- IT expert Alexander Klimeshov told Izvestia that the number of clicks, messages, and hours spent at the computer does not reflect an employee's real achievements.
- The pursuit of statistics changes team behavior: employees strive for quantity of tasks at the expense of quality.
- The expert believes it is more useful to look for the causes of delays in the processes themselves, but he does not call for abandoning monitoring altogether.
Activity in programs does not equal results
Constant monitoring of employees' actions does not guarantee productivity growth and can even harm the business. This was stated to the Izvestia newspaper by IT expert Alexander Klimeshov: the number of keystrokes, messages sent, and hours spent at the computer by no means always reflects a person's real achievements. 'High activity in an information system may not be linked to high productivity,' he explained.
Who digital metrics harm the most
According to the specialist, digital tools should primarily identify shortcomings in work organization, yet some companies prefer to evaluate employees by their activity in programs, overlooking the quality of completed tasks. This approach is especially unfair to intellectual professions: a programmer, as Klimeshov noted by way of example, may spend only a third of the workday writing code, using the rest of the time for analysis, discussions, and searching for optimal solutions.
What the expert proposes instead of ratings
The expert warned that the pursuit of impressive statistics can change the behavior of a team: if management evaluates only the number of closed tasks, employees begin to strive for quantity at the expense of quality. It is far more useful, he believes, to look for the causes of delays in the processes themselves — an automated system can show why a document has been awaiting approval for weeks or at which stage an overload occurs. At the same time, Klimeshov does not call for abandoning monitoring altogether: it is necessary for protecting information and meeting deadlines, but automatic ratings should not become the sole basis for evaluating a person.
Context: overtime and work organization
The topic of work efficiency has been raised before: Life.ru reported that overtime is often linked to poor work organization, rather than the number of tasks — constant notifications, meetings, and switching between work chats take up time that employees could have spent on truly important matters. This echoes Klimeshov's conclusion that the cause of problems should be sought in processes, not in the activity metrics of individual employees.
