As a team within a larger company, your purpose is to contribute to the larger goals. How do you know if you are doing that? As this "suicide prevention team", how do you know if you are doing a good job?
I agree with you that proxy metrics easily distract you into doing Y instead of X. My opinion is that you need to iterate on your metrics then. Not having metrics means it all depends on the gut feeling of executives.
It surely is draining to be clear about your goals. I fear we cannot really be politically correct and sufficiently honest even. What is the real goal of having a suicide prevention team? It might be token effort after some incident, then the actual goal would be to as cheap as possible while still maintaining the illusion. It might be to prevent future PR disasters, then collection helpful evidence for lawyers should be part of the job. This touches hard ethical questions and these should become evident when discussing the purpose of a team.
You don't, as an individual "unit", which is part of the problem, i.e. modern management's focus in trying to split teams/big companies down to its "elementary" unit, the employee.
> Not having metrics means it all depends on the gut feeling of executives.
And that's why you need good executives, executives who have good guts. You cannot automate your way into being successful, at the end of it all running a company is still pretty much a social endeavour, one that cannot be partitioned down to individual units, neither can its success or failure be explained by those individual units alone.
Higher ups love to be "a data guy"! Just reduce all their responsibilities into a few numbers so they don't have to really understand what's going on underneath them. Have you notice how in love they are with their "progress dashboards"? They love to kick back and put their legs on the office desk watching minions making "progress" on OKRs so they can report that to their manager. It's too much work to really understand things and be on top of them anyways...
The other way that being a numbers guy lets managers be lazy is that they will tell their data scientists to “do an analysis” so they can say that their product decisions are empirical and data driven rather than relying on any obvious design/product sense.
If they can point to a number from a really poorly/quickly done ad hoc study, they’ll never worry about being told they made the wrong decision
It's exceptionally hard to find good executives due to nepotism and other problems with hiring them that result in the wrong people in charge of the wrong thing more frequently than not, though.
So we need metrics., lest we get swept away in the Trickle-down Incompetence.
Yeah, I agree that it's a very difficult problem to solve and that getting the balance right between using metrics and having access to good "guts" is essential in a company's forward success, but that's the state of affairs we are in right now, for better or worse.
I also think that the companies that matter getting bigger and bigger, with no actual failure on the horizon (such as bankruptcy) in case of strategically wrong decisions doesn't help things one bit, because in those cases management failure is in many cases rewarded as there's no immediate and adverse affect on the life of the company itself. We need some return to creative destruction, otherwise we'll be left re-arranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic (I see this type of discussion on this particular subject as part of that metaphorical re-arrangement) until the proverbial iceberg will strike.
This has always been my beef with OKRs in the software industry. Most shops are at least pretending to be agile-ish. And this means that a random IC dev is pulling tickets from the backlog and doing them.
They're not going to be personally responsible for "improving the response time of the FizzBuzz server by 22.3%" or anything like that. No - the product manager tells the team on what they'll be working, the work gets broken down into parts, and they take what's available when they come up for air.
OKRs should never be handled at a level more granular than a scrum team, or equivalent.
> Not having metrics means it all depends on the gut feeling of executives.
Having spent a couple of decades in enterprise I can say that in my anecdotal experience it does so anyway. I've rarely seen any form of metrics put to good long term use. That's not to say that it doesn't happen, but benefit relaization seems to be something very few managers and teams actually work with beyond hitting some metric. It's usually the most obvious with changes in management. I've seen hordes of measurements thrown in the bin when a new manager took over a team and had different goals and values. On the flip side there are a lot of negative side effects of metrics over time. If you measure employees by the hour you create a culture of people who won't help each-other because how do they registrer that?
I mainly view productivity measurements as a HR tool for managers who don't actually know what their team members are doing. Which can happen for a lot of reasons, sometimes it can be because the manager is simply bad at people management, often it's because they are too busy. What is especially bad about them, however, is that people aren't consistently productive and what you really want to work with is how to keep them motivated. A motivated great employee can be unproductive in a period where they have small children, a loved one is sick and so on and an unmotivated employee can be very productive while simentaniously looking to leave your comapny.
I get why these tools exist though. Most managers are weak decision makers and HR supply them with tools that help them over come this.
I worked on the Suicide and Self Injury team at Facebook.
It was multi faceted, and whilst out of the door escalations (to emergency services) is one metric, it was a guardrail - i.e., if it went down it's likely something was wrong, not because "yay we solved suicide!".
The more difficult thing is that sometimes it's not possible to develop a metric to properly capture "decreased risk of harm", and so proxy metrics have to be employed.
I agree with you that proxy metrics easily distract you into doing Y instead of X. My opinion is that you need to iterate on your metrics then. Not having metrics means it all depends on the gut feeling of executives.
It surely is draining to be clear about your goals. I fear we cannot really be politically correct and sufficiently honest even. What is the real goal of having a suicide prevention team? It might be token effort after some incident, then the actual goal would be to as cheap as possible while still maintaining the illusion. It might be to prevent future PR disasters, then collection helpful evidence for lawyers should be part of the job. This touches hard ethical questions and these should become evident when discussing the purpose of a team.