People Will Only Do What They Are Measured By
Every organization gets exactly the behavior it rewards. That isn’t cynicism, it’s human nature.
People don’t do what leaders say matters. They do what’s measured, tracked, and rewarded.
If you measure employees by when they clock in, you’ll get people who show up on time and do the bare minimum until they can clock out.
If you measure developers by lines of code, you’ll get bloated, unreadable code.
If you measure QA by the number of bugs, you’ll get bug reports, not better software.
If you measure sales by the number of calls, you’ll get calls, not closed deals.
People will only do what they are measured by. Every metric becomes THE game.
The only question is whether you designed the right one.
Once the rules of the game are defined, people will always play to win. When people understand exactly how success is defined, their behavior naturally follows it, whether or not it aligns with the company’s real goals.
It sounds simple, but it’s one of the hardest lessons in leadership. Many leaders believe they can communicate priorities while measuring something else entirely. They say quality matters, but track speed. They talk about collaboration but celebrate individual heroics. They say “we value innovation,” but punish failure.
In the end, the system always wins, not the speech.
The Law of Bad Metrics
Metrics are powerful because they define what success looks like. But when you measure the wrong thing, you don’t just waste effort, you also corrupt behavior.
Bad metrics do four things:
- They encourage gaming. People start optimizing for the number, not the outcome.
The developer closes small tickets to hit a velocity goal. The recruiter sends weak candidates to meet a quota. - They punish good judgment. People stop thinking because judgment doesn’t show up in the dashboard. You wouldn’t speak up in a place where it’s not valued.
- They create local wins and global losses. Each function hits its target, but the overall result is worse.
Engineering meets sprint velocity, QA hits bug discovery numbers, and the release still fails. - They erode trust. Once people realize the numbers don’t reflect reality, they stop caring about them. Or worse, they start playing politics around them.
That’s how culture dies, not from bad people, but from bad measurement. This is why bad metrics quietly destroy good companies. They create motion without meaning. Effort without impact. Performance without purpose.
Remote Teams Amplify the Problem
In remote teams, what you measure is what you manage.
When people aren’t sitting in the same office, metrics become the only visible signal of performance. And that’s where things start to go wrong.
Managers, unsure how to track progress from afar, start measuring what’s easiest to see, not what actually matters.
- Green dots on Slack.
- Commit frequency.
- Tickets moved in Jira.
- Meeting attendance.
None of these measures impact. They measure noise.
And once people realize they’re being judged on noise, they start producing it endlessly. The quiet, thoughtful engineer who spends hours designing the right solution looks less productive than someone making ten meaningless commits. The QA lead who prevents a bug before it’s written looks less active than one logging something non-critical.
This kind of poor management is what makes remote teams fail, not distance, not time zones. Failure comes when leaders start tracking visibility instead of value.
Remote work doesn’t break teams. Bad measurement does.
Leadership isn’t about enforcing effort. It’s about defining what winning means and making sure the scoreboard reflects it.
The right measurement system:
- Measures impact, not activity.
- Rewards outcomes, not optics.
- Encourages ownership, not compliance.
- Aligns short-term actions with long-term goals.
The best leaders spend more time designing the game than shouting from the sidelines. They obsess over what’s being measured, how it’s tracked, and what behaviors it incentivizes. They understand that the scoreboard is the culture.
When Incentives Align, Excellence Follows
Alignment doesn’t only apply to internal performance. It’s also the foundation of how Mirigos operates.
In traditional outsourcing, vendors profit by finding the cheapest person who’s “good enough.” The metric is margin, the difference between what the client pays and what the engineer earns. That’s why clients often end up with mediocre results. The vendor’s success metric directly conflicts with the client’s.
Mirigos flipped that model. With a fixed margin, we removed the incentive to cut corners. The client, the engineer, and Mirigos all win from the same thing: long-term success.
When incentives align, quality naturally follows. And with cost being fixed, the focus shifts to consistency. From headcount to impact. From micromanaging output to trusting ownership.
The same principle applies inside any company. When teams are measured on aligned goals, they don’t need constant oversight. People move in the same direction because what’s best for them is also what’s best for the organization.
That’s what true alignment looks like. It creates clarity, accountability, and trust. You no longer have to force excellence; it becomes the natural outcome.
How to Reset the Scoreboard
If a team feels stuck or performance seems off, the first step isn’t another meeting or new strategy; it’s checking what’s being measured. Metrics shape behavior. If the behavior isn’t right, the measurement probably isn’t either.
When teams start optimizing for the wrong things, leaders have to pause and ask three simple questions:
- What behavior are we actually rewarding?
Forget what’s printed on the wall or written in company values. Look at what earns praise, promotions, and bonuses. Those are the true signals of success. If people who ship fast get rewarded, speed will dominate over quality, no matter what the slide deck says. - What unintended behaviors might this create?
Every metric distorts reality a little. If you measure response time, people will respond quickly, even if the answer is wrong. If you measure hours online, people will stay logged in even when they’re disengaged. Anticipate the distortion before it spreads. - Are we measuring activity or impact?
The goal isn’t to look busy. It’s to move the mission forward. Activity is easy to count. Impact takes more effort to define, but it’s the only metric that sustains growth.
The right scoreboard makes priorities visible and progress meaningful. It turns abstract goals into shared accountability.
When you change what you measure, you change how people act.
And when you change how people act, you change everything else: culture, outcomes, and even who chooses to stay on your team.
The Bottom Line
People will only do what they are measured by. So measure what truly matters.
Because every metric is a mirror, it reflects the leader who chose it.
When leaders design metrics that reward ownership, impact, and alignment, they build cultures that last. When they don’t, even the most talented teams drift off course.
In the end, the numbers you track become the company you build.