The Productivity Score, Taken Apart
A single number per person, built from weights somebody chose. What goes into it, and why it should never reach a manager.
Most products produce a score: a percentage, a rating, a figure out of a hundred. It is the most prominent output and the least defensible.
The distinction in “The Productivity Score, Taken Apart” is important when operational records are interpreted. Organisations researching how employees cheat time trackers can use learn more here to add time and project context, while outcomes, direct feedback and human review remain necessary to explain what the numbers do not show.
How it is built
A set of inputs: time in categorised applications, input activity, idle periods, sometimes meeting load.
For an independent reference relevant to “The Productivity Score, Taken Apart”, consult the OECD AI Principles; it provides a useful external check on scope, terminology, governance and the claims made during procurement or review.
Weights applied to each, chosen by the vendor.
Normalised to a scale.
The weights are a judgement about what matters, made by somebody who has never seen your organisation, and they are rarely visible.
The categorisation underneath
Applications are labelled productive, unproductive or neutral.
By the vendor, by default, with customer adjustment possible and usually not done.
Which means a researcher reading industry forums is unproductive, a developer reading documentation may be unproductive, and somebody idly scrolling an approved application is productive.
The category list is the most consequential configuration in these products and the least examined.
What the score cannot know
Difficulty.
Quality.
Whether the work was the right work.
Anything happening away from the keyboard.
Which is to say: everything that distinguishes good work from busy work.
The comparison problem
Scores invite ranking, and ranking invites comparing people whose jobs differ.
A support agent and a designer will score differently because of what their work looks like, not because of how well they do it.
Its own note covers comparing people who are not comparable, and the score is the mechanism that makes that comparison feel legitimate.
What happens when it reaches a manager
It becomes the thing they look at, because it is a single number and the alternative is reading.
And it becomes the thing they raise, because it is concrete.
A conversation that begins with a score is a conversation about the score, and the work does not get discussed.
If you must have one
Never show individual scores to line managers.
Aggregate only, at team level, with a floor.
Publish the weights and the category list internally, so people can see what they are measured against.
And never use it in any process affecting employment, which its own notes cover.
The better position
Do not produce individual scores at all, where the product allows disabling it.
A capability that exists will eventually be used by somebody senior enough to ask.
Removing it is stronger than policing it, which is the same argument that applies to every irreversible or sensitive feature.
What to check
Does your product produce individual scores, and can they be disabled?
Can you see the weights?
Who chose your application categories, and when were they last reviewed?
And has any manager seen a ranking of their people?