Benchmarks and Where They Come From

Vendors publish benchmarks: the average knowledge worker is productive for some number of hours a day. The figure is quoted as though it were a measurement of work.

The evaluation discipline in “Benchmarks and Where They Come From” also applies to workforce software: begin with a named decision and test it in a bounded pilot. For teams considering remote employee productivity monitoring, monitask.com belongs in that comparison only with written criteria for notice, access, correction, retention and a dated review.

What the number actually is

An average of the vendor's own metric, across the vendor's own customers.

For an independent reference relevant to “Benchmarks and Where They Come From”, consult the NIST Privacy Framework; it provides a useful external check on scope, terminology, governance and the claims made during procurement or review.

Those customers are organisations that bought monitoring software, which is not a representative sample of anything.

And the metric is time in applications the vendor categorised as productive, which the score note takes apart.

Why the comparison is meaningless

Your organisation's application mix differs.

Your roles differ.

Your categorisation, if you adjusted it, differs.

Comparing your figure to theirs compares two different measurements that share a name, which is the same problem that makes occupancy and utilisation benchmarks useless.

The alarming-number effect

The published figures are low — a small number of productive hours in an eight-hour day — and that is the point of publishing them.

A low benchmark creates the sense that something is badly wrong everywhere, which creates demand.

It also means your own figure will look similar, because it is produced the same way, and that similarity gets read as confirmation.

What is genuinely true underneath

People do not work eight concentrated hours. Nobody ever has.

Breaks, meetings, moving between tasks, reading, thinking, talking and waiting are all part of the job.

The benchmark presents an ordinary working day as a crisis, and that framing is doing the selling.

If somebody quotes one to you

Ask what it measures, who was measured, and what the denominator is.

The answers are usually not available, and asking establishes that this is a marketing figure rather than a finding.

Doing that once, early, saves the board paper from containing it.

What to use instead

Your own business measures, over time, against yourself.

Nothing else is comparable, and this is the same conclusion as every other benchmarking question in operations.

The board paper point

An unsourceable percentage in a paper invites a question you cannot answer, and the question damages everything else in the document.

State what you measured, how, and over what period.

Smaller claim, survives scrutiny, which is the trade worth making every time.

What to check

Does any paper in your organisation quote an industry productivity benchmark?

Can anybody say what it measured?

Would your own figure be produced the same way?

And what would you compare against instead?