When the Numbers Look Good but the Workplace Isn't
The dashboard is green. Your people are exhausted. Customers keep calling back. Which version of performance should a manager believe? Rising productivity can be useful evidence, but it is only part of the workplace story.
The Better Workplace with Dr. Paul Gerhardt | November 6, 2026
What this leadership podcast explores
This episode examines why strong productivity numbers do not always mean stronger organizational performance. Join professor, author, and leadership educator Dr. Paul Gerhardt for a practical look at systems thinking, balanced performance measurement, and the consequences of rewarding activity without checking outcomes.
Just because something is easy to measure doesn't mean it's the most important thing to measure.
Key lessons to take into your workplace
Look beyond output. Check whether faster work also improves customer experience, service quality, and sustainable team performance.
Watch for unintended consequences. A target can encourage useful focus, while also encouraging shortcuts or shifting unfinished work to another team.
Use a balanced view. Consider results alongside customer feedback, internal processes, and learning and improvement.
Treat a metric as a reason to ask a better question. Talk with the people doing the work before deciding what a number means.
A practical example: faster calls, more repeat problems
Imagine a fictional service team rewarded for reducing average call time. Employees finish calls faster, so the dashboard looks better. But some customers leave without a complete answer and call again. Another department spends more time correcting incomplete records. Employees feel pressure to rush.
The target improved one visible measure while shifting costs elsewhere. Before celebrating, the manager could compare call time with first-contact resolution, repeat contacts, customer feedback, rework, and workload. These are illustrative measures, not results from a reported study.
Systems thinking and balanced performance measurement
Systems thinking invites managers to follow the connections: What behavior does the target encourage? Who receives the consequences? When will those consequences become visible? A local improvement may create a delay, defect, or extra task somewhere else.
A Balanced Scorecard approach broadens the conversation across financial results, customer experience, internal processes, and learning and growth. The purpose is a connected view of performance, with measures suited to the organization's strategy. Adding more numbers alone does not solve the problem.
Three questions managers should ask
1. What important outcome could get worse while this number gets better?
2. Whose experience is missing from our dashboard, including customers and the people doing the work?
3. What balancing measure or conversation would help us spot harm before we raise the target?
Try this before your next performance meeting
Choose one metric your team reviews regularly. Ask employees what it encourages and what it misses. Add one meaningful balancing measure, agree on a small improvement to test, and review what you learn together.
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