Measurement drives behavior. That’s always been true. The problem is that most firms are still measuring the wrong things and then wondering why some of their most valuable people go unrecognized.
Timesheets tend to favor what’s easy to record, easy to defend and easy to report upward. But the people creating the most value in a firm aren’t always the ones with the cleanest timesheet, the highest visible output or the neatest-looking utilization story.
In fact, some of the most valuable people in a firm are often the hardest to measure in a traditional system because what they contribute shows up in relationships, judgment, coaching, problem prevention and keeping work moving. The traditional system of time collection simply does not work in this model.
The Wrong Scorecard Rewards the Wrong Behavior
This is where the old model starts to break down. When firms rely too heavily on submitted time, they end up rewarding activity over impact. They give more credit to what’s visible in the system than to what’s actually valuable in the work. That can create all kinds of distortion.
The person who protects a client relationship, unblocks a struggling team or prevents a project from going sideways may create more value than the person who simply logs the cleanest set of hours, but the system doesn’t always know how to recognize that.
And that’s not a small issue. It shapes promotions, performance evaluations, staffing decisions and who leadership sees as indispensable. If the data source is incomplete, then the talent story built on top of it will be incomplete as well.
Relationship Builders Are Often Undervalued
Some of the most important work in a firm doesn’t look dramatic on paper. It actually looks more like:
Checking in with a client before they panic
Mentoring a newer team member so a deliverable doesn’t fall apart later
Being the person everyone trusts when something gets messy or is unclear
That work is real, and it creates value. But timesheet-based systems often flatten it into background noise. Laurel’s State of Work Report reinforces just how much of senior professionals’ time gets spent in high-touch, people-heavy environments:
Senior professionals spend up to 37.6% of their time in meetings
46% of meeting time involves multitasking
That tells us two things at once. First, senior people are carrying a heavy load of relational and coordination work. And secondly, much of that work is happening in conditions that divide attention and hide strain.
Burnout Doesn’t Show Up Until It’s Already Expensive
This is another place where bad measurement quietly hurts firms. Burnout rarely arrives as a neat metric. It shows up first as after-hours work, context switching, constant meeting overload, invisible cleanup and senior people stepping into work they shouldn’t have to do. By the time all of this becomes obvious in attrition, disengagement or declining client experience, the damage is already done.
Based on the Laurel report, working outside standard business hours is common, and a significant share of deep work gets pushed into nights and weekends.
This pattern matters because work that occurs outside of regular business hours can signal overload, focus debt and an environment where people are compensating for a broken system with personal time.
What makes all this more frustrating is that many leaders already have instincts about who’s truly valuable. They know who clients trust. They know who keeps the team grounded. They know who gets pulled into every fire drill because that person can actually solve the problem.
But instinct isn’t the same as evidence, and firms have spent years trying to run people decisions on data that doesn’t fully capture what those people actually do.
All of this can lead to tension inside the firm, which can be avoided with visibility-backed decisions instead of incomplete records and lagging assumptions. In other words, leaders shouldn’t have to choose between gut feel and bad data. They should be able to see the work well enough to validate what they already suspect and act on it earlier.
Better Measurement Changes Who is Rewarded
When firms start measuring the right work, the right people become easier to see. They can identify who is carrying too much invisible load, who is creating outsized value through relationships and judgment, where senior talent is being deployed poorly and where burnout risk is building before it becomes a retention problem. This doesn’t just improve fairness, but also improves staffing, coaching, succession planning and client service.
Right now, measurement is driving the wrong behaviors and rewarding activity over impact. But once firms can see the full picture of how work actually happens, they can stop confusing visibility with value and start building a system where the right people really do win. This, of course, requires firms to acknowledge longstanding system flaws in order to implement the right changes moving forward.
