The shift to remote work should have been a glorious new era of trust and productivity. The data shows that remote work can boost productivity by up to 77% and drastically lower employee stress. Companies that embrace it save money, and employees are far less likely to quit. You'd think, faced with this mountain of evidence, that companies would lean into this win-win situation.
In August of 2022, just after Prime Day, Leah Cross started working as an Amazon delivery driver in Colorado. She took the job because she had long heard that it was a decent and paid well. She thought it would be a way to get her foot in with a reputable company that offered good benefits. But in the end, "It was kind of the complete opposite of my experience there," she said.
The quantum theory of management includes an analogy for the physical law of the observer effect, where observing a system changes its state. When you make a metric a target, it is not useful as a metric. Instead of reflecting whatever underlying behavior it was intended to measure, the metric becomes a measure of how well the benchmark is being gamed.
