Instruction: answer question based on the following text.

It’s time to stop measuring productivity

Output over time is a good way to measure the impact of machines, not knowledge workers. Productivity is just a mathematical equation: output divided by time. This has two implications:

1. When we talk about productivity, we are inherently and inescapably talking about output – not outcomes;

2. When we talk about increasing productivity, we’re really talking about increasing output.

Trouble is, more output doesn’t necessarily mean better results. As best-selling author Dan Pink told me recently, he could write two mediocre books in the same time it takes to write one really good book. Two books is twice the output! Hallelujah! But mediocre books don’t sell. Productivity has always been a good way to measure the impact of machines and capital. It’s just never been a good way to measure the impact of humans. So what metric should we use instead? How do we shift from focusing on efficiency to focusing on effectiveness?

At a high level, we need to emphasize outcomes for our customers and/or business and de-emphasize our output of effort. Instead of telling IT admins to set up 10 new load balancers this quarter, we should tell them to improve site performance by 10 points. Instead of telling a marketer to publish five blog posts, tell them to increase web traffic by five percent.

One beauty of shifting to an outcomes mindset is that it not only does keep us focused on results, it also frees us up to innovate in the pursuit of those results. There are loads of ways to improve system performance or drive more traffic to a website. But once we say “write five blogs,” we’ve significantly reduced the opportunity for creativity. So it’s critical to articulate goals as the results we’re after, not as to-do lists, then let the people doing the work decide the best way to go about it.

You can also determine what signals will indicate that you’re on the right path and what measures will confirm that the goal has been met. Here are a few ideas: map out (and celebrate) milestones, build feedback loops, look for continuous improvement, and value employee wellbeing. As leaders seeking to create better ways of working, if we took on the task of retiring productivity, what would you add to this list of replacements? It’s not that we need to get rid of calculatable metrics. We just need more meaningful ones.

(Avaliable in: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/the-problem-with-productivity-metrics – text adapted specially for this test).