In defense of Employee Analytics

The early feedback on Go Faster has been spicy, to say the least:

"This sounds like a horrible idea."
"I can see those micromanaging managers using this"
"I feel that using metrics from productivity tools to measure productivity is lazy and counter productive"
"Yikes"

These comments on Reddit and Hacker News communicate a fear that given a tool like Go Faster, managers will misjudge the performance of their direct reports.

While understandable, this is not the purpose of Go Faster. So allow me to explain why I built Go Faster and how employee analytics should be used to improve working conditions for both managers and individual contributors.

A manager is responsible for maintaining a holistic understanding of each of their direct reports. This includes understanding their strengths and weaknesses and what motivates them. Using this understanding, a manager creates an environment where each member of the team understands the goal of the team, the timeline for reaching the goal, and how it will be measured. Teammates then divide the work amongst themselves, or are assigned the work by their manager, and drive towards that goal.

As the team progresses, good managers constantly look for ways to improve the speed of the team. Is each person working focusing on the right task? Is anybody stuck? Is anybody lacking motivation? Is anybody working on something another team in the organization can help speed up or handle entirely?

In order to answer these questions, managers often resort to stand up meetings, status updates, and 1:1s that are time consuming and that take their team out of their flow state. That's where Go Faster comes in.

Go Faster allows managers to look at a live stream of activity and quickly answer these questions without interruption. Why is Alice working on something that is due 3 weeks from now and not the task that is due tomorrow? Why hasn't Bob done anything in the last 3 days? Why has Charlie done so much more than everybody else on the team and is he being recognized for that fact? All of this is easily gleaned from a quick look at Go Faster's analytics.

Go Faster adds data points to a manager's holistic understanding of their team. It is not intended to be the sole data on which performance is judged. It is intended to speed up the feedback loop that enables a manager to improve their team.

I know this because I've used a similar tool in my previous role as CTO of a venture backed company.

On my team we had a senior person who ran hot and cold. On some days, he would deliver a ton of functionality. Other times, he would go dark for days at a time. In a fast paced startup environment with remote employees, the employee analytics tool I used allowed me to quickly and easily notice this pattern and address it.

When faced with a chart showing a cold streak, the conversation was easy. I could stress that incremental delivery of features was what was expected of a senior employee. He could communicate that he was spending time mentoring a more junior employee, which explained some of the data. We both came away with a better understanding of how the team was working, how it could be improved, and sure enough, the team went faster as a result.

Ultimately, Go Faster cannot fix bad management. But it can improve team output, motivation, and job satisfaction in the hands of good managers. That is why I built it and how I hope it is used.