Stop Measuring Everything: Find Your HR North Star Metric for Your Distributed Team

If you’re not measuring the right things, you’re building in the dark.

Most organizations track dozens of People metrics, but very few align around the one that actually drives behavior, decision-making, and performance.

In this session, we’ll help you define your **HR North Star Metric:** the single measure that connects culture, performance, and accountability across your organization.

More importantly, we’ll show you how to operationalize it so it doesn’t just live in dashboards, but shows up in how managers lead, how teams prioritize, and how success is measured day-to-day.

Because what you measure doesn’t just reflect your culture… it shapes it!

Transcript:
Welcome, everyone! I am so excited to dive into this topic today and, you know, hit on an absolute core of how we should be running modern organizations. So stop measuring everything, find your HR North Star metric, or your distributed team.
But before we jump into it and go through all of this, we've got a lot to cover. We're gonna be doing some math, but don't worry.
It's, it's, it's a lot more straightforward than you think.
So we're gonna be doing a little math, though. A little data.
And talking about how we can measure less to be more effective.
Which can almost be paradoxical, right? So, but yeah, let's, put into the chat, where are you calling in from?
What industry are you in?
And let's get the conversation going.
I'm here in beautiful, sunny Seattle. It's been, you know, in springtime, we always have, sometimes, rain and cold, and other days…
Kind of like a brisk sun. Yesterday, it got a little bit, a little bit hot. I put up my shade structure over the deck this week.
Vancouver, I love Vancouver, very, you know, it's like a sister city to Seattle. Denver, love Denver, a lot of fun there. I love that the climbing gym in Denver has a bar, so after you're done climbing, you can have a beer, have beer with a friend. Charlotte's a beautiful place, welcome.
Welcome from Florida!
Colorado, Albuquerque, my best friend's is in Santa Fe.
So I love going to Albuquerque, a lot of good thrifting in Albuquerque.
So nice to have you on. Phoenix, Arizona.
Arizona is really up and coming, a lot more people moving to Arizona. It's a pretty beautiful place, a lot of great golfing, climbing.
Awesome, Connecticut, West Hartford, Connecticut, welcome. Welcome to everybody.
So nice to have everyone on. If you want to share, what industry you're in, like, thanks, for sharing oncology software or marketing creative agency. I used to work at a creative agency,
So I kind of understand a little bit about what it's like, you know, usually it's a very fast-paced environment, you move from project to project, but people are really, really passionate, people are really, really fun, fun work environment.
Awesome. Well, let's go ahead and get started. Please share any thoughts you have, or comments, or questions. I'll try to get to them at that moment you share it, or I'll get to it later. Rue, if you can help, because I know Jess is going to be stepping out. Rue, if you can help
If I miss any questions or comments, please bring it up to me. Please just let me know. But yeah, manufacturing, great. We work with a lot of manufacturing organizations, and I'll talk more about that in a second.
So… Let's get back into it.

Think about what happened when you made that transition to distributed or hybrid operations in the last few years, especially after COVID. Historically, managers relied on
heavily, heavily relied on physical line of sight, right? If you saw someone hitting at their desk, typing away, you assumed that they're being productive.
But when our teams are spread out across multiple locations, Time zones, digital spaces.
that line of sight completely vanishes, right? Totally obvious. So, to cope with this shift, we did what, you know, any modern or tech-enabled business does. We replaced physical presence with
digital presence, right? So suddenly, HR and operations, people, all people operations.
we're hit with unprecedented explosion of data collection now, right? Or if you're collecting it, you know what it's like when people are remote, the kind of data that we're not collecting.
And we began to track everything, right? Some companies track logins, message volumes, some companies track things like active hours or document edits, all these kinds of things to try to understand, you know, are people working?
I have a friend who has moved on from this company, but it is a publicly traded tech company in Silicon Valley.
And he was working, you know, remotely in this role, and I think it was during… maybe it was during COVID, but he'd be, like, chatting with me, and then every once in a while, he'd be like, well, I gotta… I gotta move my mouse now, right? So he'd literally then move his mouse a little bit, jiggle it around.
I have another friend that said he wrote, JavaScript code to simulate scrolling and navigating around a web page.
I mean, is this the kind of culture we want to incentivize here, or create when we track things like that? So, we're gonna talk more about that later on in this presentation.
But this is the paradox that we find ourselves in. You know, while we are capturing more data than, you know, any executive team in history.
many of us are still building our teams in the dark, and that's because the indicators we're tracking are often fragmented or backwards-looking, right? Completely disconnected from actual business outcomes.
So today, we're going to talk about how to resolve this.
We're gonna talk about how we can move away from this trap.
And… and how to unify our HR team into one core North Star metric, that primary indicator that connects your culture across your entire distributed team.
You know, it's so hard to pick that one thing, and that's true, in my business, and, you know, I was just on a webinar yesterday, I was in a meeting, and I joined it, and it was for a group of entrepreneurs.
And this woman, who's very, very sharp, was just saying, I know to focus. I know to pick, you know, courageous, you know, what would she, what'd she use? She used the word,
you know, use… be courageous in picking that niche in your business. And I think that's true here, too. It can be so hard to pick that one thing.
So we're going to talk about a little bit about how to do that. Before we do, Ru, if you want to put up the first poll, we have a couple polls, just to see who's in the room.
see where we're all at. So, which of these describes your current dashboard? Your data dashboard? You know, and if you don't even have one, just put… put zero in the chat, if you don't even have a dashboard at all. But if you do.
Go ahead and, zero. I don't think you spelled it out, Tim, zero. So,
Yeah, have one, but not used, totally. That, you know, I would say in that case, it'd be,
Yeah, we should have, we should have added, an option into the, multiple choice
not using Zilch. Zilch would be a good, 6 option here, but let's go ahead and see what people have said.
Alright.
pretty… pretty obvious, I think. I think a lot of us don't even have one, and if we have one, it's siloed.
Nobody, not a single person of the 20 folks who answered have a predictive dashboard.
Well, it's funny, people… there's a book that came out over 10 years ago, People Analytics.
what is it, the era of big data for people analytics, something along those lines, I read it, you know, many years ago. I can find it and send it after the… afterwards if you'd like, but, you know, it talks about how, you know, there's descriptive analytics, there's, predictive analytics, and then there's prescriptive.
analytics. We're actually suggest things you can do differently
And that's where… that's where we've been headed for, you know, this book is, as I mentioned, I think in 2011.
2013 or so, I think, yeah, People Analytics in the Era of Big Data, I think it's in the title of the book.
And, you know, still today, we're not doing the predictive, and we're definitely not doing the prescriptive. So how do we get… you know, I'd like to maybe explore another conversation how we get there, but…
Staying on the topic of today, which is Northstar metrics. So, how, you know, so, the core strategic flaw, over-measuring, under-operating. So, what is this, critical flaw? It's metric overload, it's actively, hurting our HR teams.
Where we're regularly generating reports, dozens of disconnected indicators across recruiting, compensation, and training.
Yeah, very few of these dashboards actually change manager behavior or business outcomes. Instead, they overwhelm managers and lead to total inaction. So the core of this issue is that the data is largely treated as informational rather than operational.
So that's what this slide is about, is moving us from, past into the future. We report on what happened last quarter instead of predicting what is coming next week. This lag creates a false sense of security, right, while critical organizational
Risks, like rising turnover, can quietly mature in the background, and we can do better.
Right? To solve this, we must transition from static, descriptive statistics to active, predictive workforce intelligence. We need to focus on primary
strategic indicators that line managers can easily access, understand, and use to guide daily decisions. And this will just make HR team even stronger, make HR more of a revenue-generating org.
And as The Economist has highlighted, HR.org has continuously grown over the years, but this can really change things if suddenly we need multiple more people on the team, and we have a budget because we're generating revenue by optimizing our workplace.
So moving along, the danger of activity surveillance, deconstructing fake productivity, right? When leaders lose physical visibility, a common failback is digital surveillance.
Many organizations turn to monitoring keystrokes, clicks, or screen activity to ensure remote workers stay on task.
But, let's be clear, right?
The approach is deeply flawed and does not preserve productivity. In fact, nearly half of remote workers say that they would consider quitting if surveillance increased.
In truth, subtracting fundamentally damages trust, it kills productivity, and damages team morale. Worse, it forces…
It forces employees to redirect their energy away from meaningful, high-value work and towards performative business, right? So…
you know,
An example is that my friend who, you know, moved his mouse around, right? Like, is that a good use of time? Like, he should be allowed to step away from the computer, talk to me a little bit, because I was staying with him, and we're co-working together.
And then he can get back to work, right? If you're tracking mouse clicks, why not track output? So we're going to get into that. You know, this is fake productivity, essentially.
Right? Or just being, the idea of just, you know, just being present without actually being productive.
So, people learn to game the system, they'll look active when actually they're checked out. So instead of tracking superficial inputs, like screen time or email volume, we must evaluate acting, you know, when employees are acting.
in their best interests around business outcomes and deliverables. Building a high-trust culture means replacing micromanagement with clear outcome-based goals.
Okay, so, so exactly what that… this is, right? So take out this table.
You can see things like, actionless meetings.
And shift over to the idea of, instead.
Async updates and document… documented decisions.
Right? So, how do we spot this performative busyness before it leads to disengagement and severe burnout?
My performative activity leads… Employees to…
Performative activity leads employees to actually push forward the, the,
things that aren't the best, right? So, we want to, instead of… of this kind of endless, actionless meetings, let's circle back kind of, culture. So, to, to more of a,
Again, the idea of identifying the signals shouldn't lead to disciplinary action, right? Instead, it should be more around the prompting a conversation. It's a manager cue to check in on employees.
on the workload distribution, clear up bottlenecks, and help the employee transition back to a focused high-value output. So if people are trending in the wrong direction, it's more of a conversation to start off with before you go into something like a PIP.
But yeah, so we're definitely going to send the slides, I see that's a question for the group.
So,
We want to break free from metric overload and superficial tracking, and we need to completely shift our… to an analytical mindset. And we can do this by taking a page out of product management.
playbooks and adopting a North Star metric. So this is a tech term, right? It's been used in tech companies, product teams use a single
primary metric to align diverse departments around a core value that they deliver. For example, Spotify tracks time spent listening. Airbnb tracks nights booked.
These aren't just vanity numbers, they represent the exact moment a customer finds value, which in turn predicts long-term business growth. When we apply this logic to people operations, an HR North Star metric represents the value employees experience and return to the company.
So I'll say that one more time. The HR Northstar metric
represents the value employees experience and return to the company. This framework reframes how we value human resources. Instead of doing HR resources as, you know, HR as an administrative cost center, we can treat employee enablement
And experience as a direct driver of sustainable business revenue.
Principles of people operations as a product. Okay, so this brings us to a revolutionary concept, right? Treat people operations as a product.
In traditional HR, we think in terms of policies, compliance, and standardized processes, but when you adopt a product mindset, you can treat employees as your users and your workplace environment as a designed product.
Just like the product team designs an app to retain customers, a people ops team designs a workplace experience to attract, engage, and retain talent, the employee experience.
This means stop measuring administrative inputs, like training attendance, and start measuring the actual value and output the programs create. By establishing continuous feedback loops.
Treating compensation, as our pricing strategy, and organizing HR into agile, cross-functional squads, we can transform HR into a deeply commercial driver of organizational growth.
So, I want to introduce, you know, I think we've all heard the term,
You know, employee, you know, customer lifetime value, we use that in your product. What about the employee lifetime value?
Right, so as a… as a metric. So, one of the most powerful, candidates for an HR North Star metric is the ELTV.
So this comes from, again, marketing term, customer lifetime value.
And VLTV measures the net value contribution an employee provides to your business over the entire tenure.
It's the ultimate tool to quantify the commercial impact of your people strategy.
So the LTV journey begins at day one with a negative value, representing the recruitment costs, the onboarding, overhead, and as the employee is trained and onboarded, their output increases, and eventually they break even.
And eventually then, into, productivity, and into profitability for that role.
So, in a healthy culture, that peak is sustainable throughout the entire career progression, and, you know, of course, with strong manager support.
Now, conversely, poor management can trigger early disengagement, causing the employee's value out to collapse into quiet quitting, right? And then ultimately they leave, or they're fired.
Our goal in PeopleOps is to manage this curve, shorten the onboarding, maximize peak output, and delay departure of high-performing employees.
I just want to highlight, just for a second, a quick plug while I have a moment.
So, just to recap, I am, Alex Granny, I am the CEO of Recognize, and you can always connect with me on the QR code if you're liking the presentation.
And, what I am passionate about, what I spend my week on, is really around, employee recognition, rewards, culture, and engagement.
So just to give a look what that looks like, we have a platform called Recognize. If you'd like to learn more about it, there's gonna be some links at the end of the presentation. Always, you can just go to our website, which is just Recognizeapp.com.
What we do is we do employee recognition, we do announcements, we help companies frame the conversation around their values.
And these are all customizable. The entire program can be tailored to you. Does not cost a lot of money to get this up and running. There's a lot of very expensive ways to do a recognition program, that can be tailored to you, and we do it in a really affordable way. And we provide things like surveys, so you can run your employee engagement surveys.
You can redeem rewards with Recognize, like time off, or gift cards.
Or you can redeem things like concert tickets.
With our platform, or company swag, as well. And you get… you can earn these points, which can equal dollars, and you can decide what that is. We work with manufacturing companies, we work with people with just people with emails, or just phone numbers, we work with international teams, we are in 150 countries for recognition and rewards.
And you can tailor the program to be international, to recognize, nominate, submit challenges, and more with the recognized platform, generate award certificates, or even have it up on your TVs in your lobby or, factory.
floor, and have that cycle through and showcase work anniversaries, birthdays, and those peer-to-peer publicly sent recognitions. You can set up budgeting, you can do a lot of great things. We do a lot of things for managers, we're in Outlook, we're in Slack, we're in Teams.
Thanks for that short break, thanks for that little commercial, and let's get back to the presentation.
So I love this stuff, so this is going to be even more interesting. So as I mentioned in the very beginning, there's gonna be a little bit of math, but it's really not, that big a deal. It actually makes a lot of sense.
So,
So here's an equation for this, right? So if you look, there's N equals V minus C, right? And they're all parenthesesied around T. Well, T is time.
Right, that makes sense. So the 10-year… the 10-year of your employee, so this would be, you know, actually getting a, getting a number, an actual, you know, gauge of the employee's lifetime value.
So, it's value times the time they're there, minus…
Right? The cost of the employment, times, the time, and then that will give you the net value contribution.
Right? So it's really awesome that we can actually ground our talent strategy in financial reality by modeling the employee lifetime value mathematically.
Right, so this output…
represents, their contribution, and so, as you can see, it's, you know, it can be a little tricky to calculate the value. People are wondering, well, how do I calculate value? And that's where, you know, devils in the details. And I'll talk more about that as well.
So let's go on to the, next slide, because it's just a continued conversation here.
Okay, so, to fully integrate the people operations with that kind of corporate finance, we have to track the talent investments with the same kind of discipline
That we track marketing users for growth and product. So this is achieved by measuring the value, the ratio, rather, of the employee lifetime value to the talent acquisition cost.
Right? So the talent acquisition cost is calculated by dividing the total recruitment costs by the number of, by the number of hires. Right, so comparing the ELTV to the TAC,
shows us the little financial return on our talent programs, highlighting where value is leaking. And then you can track this over time in your scorecard that you should create. When you track this, you can then measure to see if there's been a delta change over time.
So, again, if our onboarding is weak.
time to productivity will drag, and that will eat into our margins. If our management is poor, employees will become disengaged early, causing the output to drop before they leave. So this ratio helps HR demonstrate commercial effectiveness and justify
people and investments directly to the CFO and the rest of the executive team.
So another exceptional, candidate for your, North Star metric, your HR Northstar metric, is the employee experience, or as we call it, EX, right?
Research consistently demonstrates that companies that prioritize EX output
Compared to their competitors, achieve a 17% productivity boost And 21% greater profitability.
So, this represents a highly effective leading indicator of organizational growth.
When we adopt EX as our North Star metric, We shift from reacting
To attribution, to proactively building a workplace where people want to stay.
It focuses leadership on the core phases of the talent journey, structured onboarding, supportive daily environments, and clear paths for professional growth.
By systematically measuring and improving EX… I'll scroll down a little bit, because this is a long slide.
Organizational… organizations naturally control recruitment costs, lower voluntary turnover, maintain highly scalable, motivated workforces.
It aligns people, and connects your strategy directly to business success.
I think I may have missed, another poll.
From last slide, actually. Rue, do you want to do the next poll, please?
Okay, doing good on time here.
Okay, so biggest barrier for, I'm sorry, biggest barrier from adopting a single metric.
So what is… what is keeping you from, developing a core, HR Northstar metric?
And put a few options in. If I did not cover the option you're thinking, put it in the chat.
Well, it's interesting, yeah, a bit around, a bit across the board. Obviously, employee trust is on the lower side.
40% are saying, data chaos.
35% is executive and manager buy-in.
that's the most frustrating of all, right? Like, I can't be mad at math. Data chaos, I can't be emotionally upset about that. You know, maybe I may be frustrated by it.
Annoyed, peeved that we have data chaos, but when you're blocked by executives or manager buy-in, excuse me.
That's the most frustrating, for sure. So I feel for you. If anyone wants to share anything more on any of these, please put it in the chat. I want to hear from you.
And let's move on to the next topic.
Okay, so we have a few case studies.
Some of these are tech companies, so, but I think they apply to… to everybody. So, GitLab is… they're like a…
like, the biggest, you know, I think they're one of the world's largest mobily remote organizations. They have thousands of employees across dozens of countries.
And they don't have a single physical office, so, you know, how do they do it, right? So their operational model, is completely documented in a public handbook to, you know, ensure absolute transparency.
GitLab completely rejects tracking desk time or active hours. Instead, they focus on explicit, outcome-driven key performance indicators mapped directly to talent retention.
Performance and internal growth.
They actively monitor indicators like 12-month voluntary team member turnover, success rate or performance improvement over time, new hire location factor, discretionary bonuses, all these types of things.
This outcome, focus discipline allowed them to build highly accountable, high-trust remote cultures.
All right, another case study, apologize, another tech company, and, you know.
take some of this with a grain of salt, you know, but I think it is… I think it can work for even the manufacturing organization.
You know, I don't know if we're there yet,
as far as people's ability to adopt technologies, but for instance, now that we have ChatGBT, imagine your employee handbook is connected to ChatGBT,
And then imagine you have a ChatGPT that's in text message. So you can just save in your phone your company's handbook.
And then be able to text message any question you want. Or we could prompt you, if you are familiar or understand what it is. And so you can be on the go, you could be on the factory floor, and you actually can converse with a chatbot that actually works.
I think we have learned helplessness from interacting with so many terrible chatbots over so many years, and now they're finally, good, and they're getting better. So…
that's the future, in my opinion. So even if these are tech company solutions, I think some of them can still work with the right
kind of… Adjustments for any organization.
But Atlassian, if you're familiar, they're, you know, they run Jira, they have Confluence, they have a number of pieces of software, and they have a distributed framework of Team Anywhere, so they have 11,000 employees working across multiple countries. I think they're… they started in Australia, I believe.
So there, you know, which is a pretty hard time zone if you're in New York City.
So to optimize this distributed workforce, they've established a dedicated Team Anywhere lab run by behavioral scientists who design and test remote collaboration solutions.
And so what they're finding, is that in a no, in-office mandate.
Instead choosing, to measure focus, connection, and, and thus real estate efficiency. So this experiment, you know, they run experiments,
In meeting optimization, for instance, and resulted in a 13% reduction in meeting hours and a 32% improvement in focus time, employee focus time.
They also track real estate metrics like utilization and cost per visit, reallocating savings from closed offices.
to fundamental structures, things like in-team gatherings, right? And so, you know, the data shows that these intentional gatherings boost team connection by 27%,
With positive effects lasting up to 5 months.
So we're gonna talk more about, how to have structured, time,
together. So, or… and I don't know if it's going to be in this session, but I believe in another session we're going to be doing, how to have intentional, group gatherings. In fact, our team's group gathering is coming up,
I'm really excited in about a month.
We're gonna be together in Washington here, in Leavenworth.
But anyway, another company, Buffer, another tech company, but I think, you know, these still can apply to everybody. So, they're, they're really a pioneer in remote-first operations. They're doing this well before COVID, our team as well.
So,
you know, but we try to hire… we… our half of our team is on the other side of the world, which makes it, obviously, really tough, no matter what. You can't… you know, if someone's asleep while you're working, that's gonna be… it's gonna make it tough. But you can do things to make it better, like emphasizing, documentation and psychological safety.
You know, one of the things that Buffer has found is that remote onboarding can easily leave new hires feeling isolated, which can dramatically increase early turnover risk.
So to solve this, Buffer assigns every new hire, a cross-functional culture buddy. This buddy acts as an informal coach to provide context on company history, values, and norms. Other webinars we've talked about, Harvard Business Review, showing how,
That mentor really drives productivity and long-term engagement and retention.
So these culture buddies, as they call them at Buffer, specifically are trained to deliver both supportive coaching and constructive, corrective feedback for new hires to help them grow. By prioritizing their peer support and maintaining extreme operational transparency.
such as publishing their salary formulas openly, Buffer has built a incredibly strong, high retention culture. So again, it's about being intentional, about designing that employee experience, really from a human-centric perspective.
Let me just check on time here, we're doing great.
Okay, so, to make these metrics work, we must evolve people analytics into something far more impactful.
to workplace intelligence. So traditionally, HR analytics focused on, again, descriptive.
History, historical data, so it's simply, you know, compiling reports of past voluntary turnover and headcount changes.
Right? We need to move to more of a workplace intelligence that represents a change in both the scope and ambition, and shifting our goal from static insights into active, real-time operational index. This will apply to,
you know, corporate finance to talent planning. It should integrate HR data with that financial operational systems.
So this gives managers that predictive, real-time signal that they need to act before an employee becomes a departure.
And, and, you know, thinking about my business with Recognize, I mean.
the more types of structured data that you can have, and that's one of the things that that book I mentioned talked a lot about, is unstructured versus structured data.
And when you have API connections into things like recognition programs or mentor programs, this can really give a better picture of the health of your workforce and which of your employees are high-value employees.
Right? It's telling when people are integrated into the culture, they're commenting on recognitions, they're commenting on things in Slack, but while still getting… or Teams, but still getting their core work done, and they're being recognized for their accomplishments on a regular basis. That's an employee that you want to hold on to.
Okay, so traditional analytics versus a modern workplace or workforce intelligence. So, in North… in HR, Northstar metric is only going to be as effective if we're driving manager behavior and accountability on the ground, right? We all know that, which is why it's so frustrating
When we can't get manager buy-in or executive buy-in.
But we need to… we need to continuously, and frequently compile engagement and turnover metrics
and just keep bringing it up, right? You know, the numbers speak for themselves, and if they remain purely informational, and there's no, you know, bias or opinions put into it.
People will start to listen.
And they'll start to take you more seriously on this workplace intelligence concept. So, to operationalize our data, leadership must help us, at least work with us, to define exactly what managers are expected to do.
when specific patterns emerge, such as declining engagement, or rising early turnover. So this means answering 5 critical questions.
Okay, so who is responsible for the results?
Which metrics require direct action?
And when must leadership be notified of trends?
What corrective steps are expected?
And how will follow-up be measured? So these are really, critical questions, to ask.
So, operationalizing the North Star, driving manager accountability.
So this ties to, a bit to the last one. When managers know that leadership is actively monitoring these patterns, their behavior adjusts, right? Performance conversations happen earlier.
And issues are resolved before they escalate. So, step one, identifying ownership of the metrics, define the trigger points, right?
you know, what… how do you know when you need to shift, right? Establish the escalation paths, so, you know, what needs to happen as a result, how can we correct actions, and how can we measure the follow-up? And this should all be documented, into your handbook or your wiki.
You know, we use Notion at our company, I mentioned before, Notion is a awesome tool, for just creating documents. Every document is a folder in Notion. And then you can connect it to a LLM, and then connect that into Microsoft Teams, which is incredible.
Okay, so a little bit more math, but it's really basic.
So to eliminate performative presence, distributed organizations must establish outcome-based performance management, evaluating employees based on their value and the deliverables
they create, rather than the hours they log in, or, or, right? And this will build trust, in the end, and, ensures, objectivity.
Another problem is, is, being objective. So this requires us to define clear, measurable targets using a smart framework. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Time-based, you may have heard this, idea, SMART, SMART goals.
If you don't know it, Google it.
But SMART goals is, you know, every goal should be a SMART goal, essentially, right? Again, specific.
Measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
We can then actively measure our team's progress using a standardized goal achievement rate.
And that's what the algorithm there is. Shifting the performance management to results removes subjective bias, micromanagement.
and makes performance reviews fair and consistent across locations, and that's the challenge, is when you, you know, you want to be consistent across locations. I think it's always telling when, a fantastic restaurant opens a second location.
There's a restaurant in London. It's a fixed-course, vegetarian, kind of Mediterranean-Israeli restaurant that's, that's really incredible.
But they opened a second location, right, in SoHo, and it's just not as good. You know, it's so hard, to be consistent. Now they're saying they're gonna move to New York, too, and that's gonna be really tough. So, I think we all know how hard it is to be consistent, even with two restaurant locations, how, you know, the same city.
How can we, you know… it's obvious when the food changes, it's not so obvious in the business, which is why we need to have metrics like this
Analytics and, and algorithms that are consistent across location that take out that subjective component, or even cultural components.
So, in a distributed team, which I'm sure many of you are, right, productivity is closely tied to how effective information can flow
from one location, one time zone to the next. Breakdowns in communication happen quickly, you know, things like work delays, handoff friction, alignment gaps.
To counter this, organizations should adopt an asynchronous-first communication strategy. This means shifting the default way of working from real-time meetings
And,
and instant messages to documented updates, recorded briefs, and shared project spaces. We can measure this shift using collaboration telepathy.
telemetry, sorry.
I get that word wrong all the time. Tracking participation in shared tools, asynchronous efficiency, and information
completedness. So understanding these coordinated patterns serves as a critical leading indicator for long-term team productivity.
So again, this shift is really important. These three things are something that I really want you to take away from this presentation.
So, protecting focus time and preventing remote burnout. This is a huge one.
The flexibility of remote work, you know, it's incredible, right? I'm in my home office right now.
But it can also lead to blurred boundaries, overwork, let's be honest, underwork.
And also some severe burnout, depending on the type of employee. And burnout, you know, even if you're underworking, you can still burn out, because maybe from loneliness, right? Because disengagement can easily go unnoticed in distributed, settings.
Leadership must use data, ethically to monitor and support employees' well-being. So instead of spying on people, we can analyze aggregated team-level work
the metadata of that work, right? We can track the focus time,
to ensure teams have uninterrupted blocks, or that for deep work, right? You don't have to always be green on teams, right? And we should also monitor after-hours activity as well.
If you can… if you can monitor, who's working late, that can really help you understand a better picture of what people are doing. You know, sometimes you have to work late because you're… you're meeting with
a team on the other side of the world. Meetings do happen, but we want to use documentation and processes to limit how many of those resultless meetings occur.
Right, so keeping a close eye on the well-being trends allows managers to proactively step in and rebalance workloads, protect time that it should be for focus.
Before performance drops.
Awesome, we're almost at the end. Thanks everybody for sticking around for the, for the session.
Just two more slides, and then we'll talk about some of the next, next things we're gonna be doing here. Recognize.
So, implementing a North Star metric, can often uncover serious technical, operational, and even political challenges.
I think we all know the drama inside our organizations. Technically, people data often lives in multiple siloed systems, as we touched on in the poll earlier. And these databases are often messy, inconsistent, have chaos, as we talk about, or even duplication.
And then also, politically, managers can actively resist new metrics or manipulate data, let's be honest.
to high performance issues out of fear of missing targets. To address these challenges, organizations, we must build integrated data pipelines, establish clear data cleanup, and standardized processes and procedures
You know, I just think about, a story of a friend who, used to be at Amazon, and Amazon may have a daily
question, right? Everyone gets one question every day, and the person next to you, it's a different question, right? I think there's, like, 4 categories, 10 questions each or so, and they change, but most of the time they say the same, just cycle through.
And there's a section on your manager. Do you, you know, does your manager support you?
You know, do you believe in your manager? Do you believe in the leader's mission? Right? These types of questions. And, you know, in the one-on-ones, one particular manager would say, hey, when you get a survey about me, you know, I'd really love for you to give me a 5 out of 5.
Right, you know, so those kinds of, you know, kind of almost, like.
seems innocent, nudges, but it's really, truly, data manipulation, and we wanna, we wanna, squash that.
Awesome.
Awesome, so yeah, so last slide here, to sum it up, how you can implement a roadmap towards this. So, transitioning, to an outcome-focused HR Northstar metric requires a structured, phased roadmap.
Phase one, organizational alignment. So over the next 30 days, try to define the primary candidate for a metric. Secure executive buy-in, talk to them about it. Eliminate vanity metrics.
And then, Phase 2, in a month to, a few months, right?
Or another month, rather. Focus on the technical integration and auditing. Audit exists,
Audit… audit exists, you know, audit existing databases.
And, and resolve inconsistencies, separate systems. You can use AI to, you know, delete the duplication, right? It's incredible what you can do with that.
and then implement robust privacy safeguards, right?
So you want to restrict, data access. You know, with Recognize, our platform, you know, because we can do role-based restrictions, every piece of data in Recognize can be separated to different roles, which is how it could be with enterprise organizations. Okay, and then the rest of the quarter, 60 to 90 days, last phase.
Should be deployment and training. Roll out clean, simple dashboards, train managers on how to use the trends and how to interpret the trends, and establish clear operational responses to drive accountability.
If you don't have a dashboard, honestly, you can take a spreadsheet, and if you're allowed to use an LLM,
Like ChatGPT or Gemini, you can paste it in and get… you know, Notebook LM is incredible. Notebook LM is the one, you know, it's by Google, it's the one LM, that generates graphics that don't put in their own content. Only uses your content and creates incredible
presentations.
But always check to see which AIs you are allowed to use, you know, maybe scrub data as well, anonymize data, before it enters into those things. But yeah, so we have some, things coming up.
I'm gonna just… Pull that up… Please come to our,
Live demo that we're gonna be hosting, it's in about a week or so.
So, it's a 45-minute session where we'll show you how Recognize works, how you can create a culture of recognition reward, in your organization, how to simplify your processes with anniversaries, and those life events. HR loves Recognize because
They can do a lot less work.
And then the staff love Recognize because it… you actually know what success looks like. You can go into Recognize and see what's happening. You can get a text message on your phone, you can see it in Teams, you don't have to implement new systems or go to websites, have another tab in your browser.
So please come to that. let's do one more poll before you, everyone, heads out.
I'm gonna show the next webinar as well, which is in June.
So how did the, session go? You know, did this get you fired up?
I hope so, but please be honest, if it was a snooze, I want to know.
May or Solid, so I hope you love those. It kind of reminds me, if you've ever driven a Tesla, I love how, the self-driving mode, it has, sloth mode.
And then it has Mad Max mode, like…
The car will speed, and you don't… obviously, you'll get a ticket, but if you get caught, but but,
But yeah, Rue put in Fired Up, Solid May, Snooze, I love those, I love those labels, Roo. But yeah, please come to our next,
Webinar, it's in a couple weeks, I get a break next week. I hope everyone has a fantastic Memorial Day weekend, which is, this weekend, but let's see the poll, let's see how people felt.
Awesome, solid takeaways, I really appreciate that. I'm super happy to see zero snooze. I saw two Mays, I hear ya. We will… we will, keep improving. You know, it's the maze and the snoozes that are really gonna drive me to get the next,
One. I remember, there's a story about Jimi Hendrix where,
He, he, he comes off, stage, and his, the producer of the club, producer of the show.
you know, Jimmy says, how was it? How is it? And, and he said, I can figure out… I can get the name of the person who said this. There's a… there's a performance hall in San Francisco. I'm named after him. But he, he responds back to Jimmy, you did everything but play.
Because I guess Jimmy just kind of danced around all this stuff.
And then Jimmy went, he was so mad, he went back on stage, and he played the most amazing, you know, set of guitar music that anyone has ever heard.
So sometimes we need that push
So yeah, thanks everyone for coming. I hope you come to the webinar, in 2 weeks. Come to that live demo, I'll put that back up. That's next week. You can win $100. Look, if 10 people come, you have a 1 in 10 chance of getting $100. If 20 people come, that's still really good odds, 1 in 20 odds. That is…
Imagine buying a scratch ticket and having 1 in 10 odds of winning $100. That's, like, impossible. That would be, like, everyone would be going crazy always buying scratch tickets.
So, but we're not just doing it so you can get $100. You can also, if you do become a new customer, with us, you'll get $1,000 towards rewards. So, sometimes our subscriptions are as little as, per year, depending on your company size, like $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 a year. So you get $1,000 back
If you come to that webinar, it goes towards rewards, for your employees, you know, which is always a conflict between recognition and rewards, is that you want the money, your budget, to go towards rewards. You don't want it to go towards a software solution, which is why we keep costs down.
And give back by having some of our rewards actually be discounted.
So, to the 33 people who've still left in the room, thanks so much for coming. Please come to our live demo, please come to our webinar, come to our website, recognizeapp.com, learn more about us. We want to learn more about you. So we'll be connecting with you after the webinars. Follow me on LinkedIn, message me anytime you want.
If you see me at a conference, come up and talk to me. So thank you, everybody. Really appreciate everyone for coming. Have a wonderful Thursday, and a fantastic
Memorial Day weekend.