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Volometrix Attempts To Measure Employee Productivity--But Is It A Flawed Model?

This article is more than 9 years old.

We’re seeing a tectonic shift in the way organizations work. Distributed team, global collaboration, remote-working and cloud tools all make agility ever more possible within organizations. But it also makes it harder to really assess employee, and by extension organizational, efficiency. This is the problem space that Volometrix is looking to help with and the company has just filed a patent for an interesting piece of predictive people analytics software.

Volometrix is hoping that by exposing organizational metrics (or at least employee metrics within an organization) it will be able to help drive growth and efficiency. That’s a lofty goal so let’s see what Volometrix actually does. The product delivers a number of different organizational metrics:

  • Organizational Load Index (OLI):  OLI is calculated as the total amount of time any given employee consumes from the rest of the organization based on meetings they schedule and emails they send out.  For example, if Ed schedules a 1 hour meeting with 4 people, he has consumed 4 hours of time from the organization. For both meetings and email, the time imposed on others to read each email sent is calculated using Volometrix Time Allocation methods.
  • Utilization: Utilization is calculated by looking at the spread of hours between a person's FIRST sent email or meeting attended in a day and that person's LAST sent email or meeting attended that day. For instance, if you sent your first email at 7am, your first meeting started at 9am, your last meeting ended at 4:30pm, and you sent your last email at 6pm, your utilization for that day would be 11 hours.
  • Network Efficiency IndexThe Network Efficiency Index (NEI) measures how efficiently a given company’s employees build and maintain internal networks.  It is calculated by the total # of hours spent emailing and meeting with other employees divided by the number of network connections, where “network connection” is calculated based on a pair of employees meeting both a frequency of interaction threshold and an intimacy of interaction threshold (E.g., 2 or more interactions per month which include 5 or fewer people total).
  • Number of people in cross-collaboration: This metric can be dynamically calculated for any set of two groups within the company. It is based on the number of unique individuals who participated in email communication or attended a meeting involving anyone from the two groups in question.
  • Time Fragmentation: Time Fragmentation measures the extent to which meetings fragment the working time of employees.  It is calculated as the number of 2 hour blocks with no calendared meetings available during normal employee working hours  (e.g., if your standard working hours are 8am-5pm and you have a one hour meeting at 10am and a two hour meeting at 2pm, then you would have 2 2-hour blocks of time available.)

And this is where I have some reservations with Volometirx’ approach. It seems to me that all of these metrics are proxies for efficiency but do nothing substantive to actually measure outcomes. Working long hours, being part of a particular number of meetings, spending time building “network intimacy” – those are all metrics that, in my view, measure an individual’s ability to play the corporate game and build their own networks within the organization. Whether or not that has an impact upon actual outcomes is highly debatable – I’d suggest not.

Where are the measures that correlate time spent with actual outcomes – income generated, products developed, projects undertaken? Those are the real measures of efficiency. While Volometrix is an interesting conceptual experiment and delivers some interesting algorithms, it doesn’t, in my view, deliver insights that can actually change organizational performance. The company, naturally, disagrees and suggests that its metrics enable:

...unprecedented understanding of the daily activities of an organization to diagnose inefficiencies and align teams around top business priorities, resulting in organizational productivity improvements of 10-20% and reducing operating costs by millions of dollars. … Volometrix’s algorithms use these data inputs to identify the optimal employee and team alignments for organizational health

And some research seems to indicate that's a valid argument. In particular studies looking at wasted time and money in meetings and social networks and how they relate to individual and group performance. Indeed a recent article in the Harvard Business Review by Volometrix' CEO Ryan Fuller discusses the how top performers within a sales organization are correlated with behaviors like: strong internal networks, more interaction with senior-level staff and high customer communication? Maybe my skepticism is unwarranted.

It seems like Volometrix equates communication and meeting efficiency with actual hard outputs and it strikes me that this is a difficult jump to make. Volometrix strikes me as a really interesting technology story, but lacking in real value for actual organizations. Time will tell whether my analysis is correct I guess.