The Wall Street Journal has a column today called, “A Modern Conundrum: When Work’s Invisible, So Are Its Satisfactions”:
In the information age, so much is worked on in a day at the office but so little gets done. In the past, people could see the fruits of their labor immediately: a chair made or a ball bearing produced. But it can be hard to find gratification from work that is largely invisible, or from delivering goods that are often metaphorical. You can’t even leave your mark on a document in increasingly paperless offices. It can be even harder trying to measure it all. That may explain why to-do listers write down tasks they’ve already completed just to be able to cross them off…
Jon Williams once worked in an auto-claims department where the number of new-claim calls, which could take a half hour, were tallied with the same weight as brief reminder calls to customers. Even so, his greatest sense of achievement was transforming an initially angry and frustrated customer into someone who was satisfied and even laughing. “That wasn’t measured at all,” he says…
The loss of such control over how and when a job is done is one reason the Industrial Revolution was resisted, says Gregory Clark, a professor of economics at University of California, Davis. “It seemed like the complete destruction of the value of work to people,” he explains…
Mechanical engineer Robert Schneider at least gets to see the ball bearings he designed being produced in the manufacturing plant downstairs from his office. But he spends a lot of time researching things that don’t directly translate into a finished product. “Much of the work I do goes unnoticed by anyone but me,” he says. “I need to rely on myself to know I am doing worthwhile work.”…
Somehow I think there’s a lesson in all of this for philanthropy. Some readers might suggest that the article shows how the modern economy sucks the life out of… life. But I would look to the obvious fact that even if we have more trouble measuring our work in an information economy, the work we do is not less meaningful. It seems to me that the key is to find ways to connect the work we do with some sort of progress. Progress towards better products, better services, more sales, happier customers… and the solving of social problems. In a world where invisible “information” is the product we produce, we must re-double our efforts to measure impact. But we must focus on measuring what matters, not that which is easiest to see.