(Illustration by Adam McCauley)
For social enterprises and nonprofits, measurement is critical for survival. And yet consensus on how to measure social impact (or social value) remains elusive, despite a growing demand by funders for data. Different organizations rely on different methods, and many struggle with measurement, seeing it as a burden.
As a doctoral student in management, Haley Beer became interested in how to measure the mission work of social enterprises. How could methods for measuring impact be developed and put to better use to ensure that employees and organizations derived greater value from what they measured?
A new paper by Beer, a professor of operations management at the UK’s Warwick Business School; her colleague Pietro Micheli, a professor of performance and innovation at Warwick; and Marya Besharov, a professor of organizations and impact at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, shows how performance measurement—or formal data collection and analysis “about organizational processes, activities, or groups of people”—can benefit employees, especially in helping them see value and meaning in their work. When organizations carefully consider who is being asked to engage in measurement practices and how employees are involved in the process, the consequences can be far-reaching, the authors found.
Beer began by collecting observational and archival data and conducting interviews with employees at two large social enterprises in the United Kingdom. To protect their confidentiality, the paper anonymizes them as “Youth Futures” (YF), which works with young adults to prevent homelessness and advance economic independence, and “Organic Earth” (OE), which promotes sustainability through organic growing. The two organizations operate in an institutional context where measurement practices are “well-developed,” Beer says. Initially, Beer and her coauthors set out to analyze how employees at YF and OE used measurement tools in their work. They soon discovered, however, that the monitoring and evaluation of employee performance had profound effects: It could affirm or challenge employee perceptions of how meaningful their work was.
“Some might take measurement for granted, or see measurement processes as neutral,” Beer says, “but there are many ways in which they can influence an individual’s sense of whether their work is worthy or not.”
Immersing herself in day-to-day operations as well as sitting in on strategic meetings with executives, Beer scrutinized how employees engaged with measurement tools, studied the context for these encounters, and documented individual responses. “At the heart of it, we knew we wanted to understand what was going on for people,” Beer says. “We wanted to know about their experiences, their subjective feelings and moods. Their reasons for liking certain impact measures or tools, and not liking others, and their reasons for being motivated or for feeling disenfranchised.”
The authors identified three pathways—“practical, existential, and relational”—through which an employee’s “work worthiness,” or the perception that their work is meaningful or worthy, was affirmed or challenged. The three pathways, while not mutually exclusive, provide an analytical model for understanding what’s at stake in performance measurement. “There’s an old adage in management research and practice: ‘You get what you measure,’” Justin Berg, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, says. “This paper shows us that the implications of measurement are not so straightforward when it comes to the sense of worthiness employees derive from their work.”
Along the “practical pathway,” some measurement encounters cultivated a sense of purpose and accomplishment, helping employees complete work activities, the researchers found. Alternatively, employees could become mired in tedious data collection that hindered progress at work. The “existential pathway,” as the authors define it, highlights other mechanisms that affect employee perceptions of work worthiness. Efforts to monitor and evaluate performance can serve as opportunities to show employees their own impact.
But in some cases, measurement practices “missed the mark,” obscuring an employee’s contributions to the organization and the larger social or environmental mission. When employees were included in the design and implementation of measurement processes, they saw the value of their voice and felt respected and supported by coworkers. Conversely, “silencing” occurred along the “relational pathway” when employees were excluded, leaving them without a sense of having meaningful relationships at work.
Other researchers might assess the relative importance of each pathway in shaping employee perceptions, Beer says, or extend the model to new settings. For Berg, the authors have “uncovered insights that may help employees and their organizations get more from what they measure.”
Haley Allison Beer, Pietro Micheli, and Marya Besharov, “Meaning, Mission, and Measurement: How Organizational Performance Measurement Shapes Perceptions of Work as Worthy,” Academy of Management Journal, forthcoming.
Read more stories by Daniela Blei.