WORKING IN THE OPEN
I built a way for employers to see how their people were doing. It didn't work the way I expected, and the part I'm least sure about is the part I still haven't solved.
This is the story in the order it happened. There's nothing to buy at the end of it.
If you disagree with any of it, there's a button. It's anonymous, and it comes to me — not to the page.
Someone who helps lead a business asked me for a snapshot of how its staff were doing.
I built a wellbeing check-in where people rated their week out of ten. What came back was that a 7 isn't a fact. It's a mood, a manager, and whatever happened that morning. People report loudly when things are bad and go quiet when things are fine — so the numbers you get are complaints with a scale attached. A system that takes them at face value tells a business owner less than he already knew.
Most organisations mobilise when someone is struggling and do nothing at all when someone is steady. Support, check-ins, adjustments — all of it triggered by trouble. I think that quietly teaches people that the way to be noticed is to be in difficulty, and leaves the ones who are doing fine feeling unseen.
This work came out of a platform that was trying to do too much.
Taking it out was the right call. That platform is a training-provider system now and it's better for being one thing.
It wasn't a verdict on the problem. The problem is still there, I still don't have a good answer to it, and this page is where I'm working on it in the open.
Where it came out of →The first version watched email timestamps as a burnout signal. It couldn't run, because someone with a say in that business was against monitoring of that kind in principle. That objection arrived before I had a product and it hasn't gone away. Wearables are the obvious answer to unreliable self-report. They're also the version where the person being measured no longer chooses what they disclose. I don't have a good answer to that yet.
If you'd talk about any of this, I'd like to hear it.
Email me