Are your performance metrics inadvertently leading to engagement and retention risks?

By Kate Neilson

on September 16, 2026

Featured, Performance, Talent management

Intense metricised performance systems can trigger worker disengagement and higher turnover intent by forcing employees to neglect essential unmeasured tasks, finds new research.

The push to metricise work has reached unprecedented levels across workplaces.

Powered by automated digital tracking software and real-time HR performance dashboards, organisations can now monitor employee output at a granular level. From customer scan rates in supermarkets and call-centre log metrics to IT ticket response times, website clicks and sales targets, contemporary software offer employers unprecedented visibility into daily operations.

Businesses use this technology to evaluate performance, clarify expectations and optimise organisational output. However, new insights into metricised employee performance systems reveal a far more complex behavioural reality.

In a study published in The International Journal of Human Resource Management, researchers examine how high-intensity performance tracking can negatively shape worker behaviour.

The paper – co-authored by Professor Martin Edwards, HR analytics expert from the University of Queensland – demonstrates that hyper-metricising work introduces a risky behavioural paradox. The more intensely a company monitors performance metrics, the more it encourages workers to neglect the unmeasured tasks critical to long-term organisational survival.

Below, we unpack some of the key insights for HR practitioners, including Professor Edward’s advice on how to counterbalance some of these potential risks.

“There is a real danger that these systems end up steering people away from important non-measured behaviors that an organisation would actually want people to be doing in their jobs.” – Professor Martin Edwards, HR analytics expert, University of Queensland.

The core paradox of metricised systems

When leadership introduces metricised performance systems, the goal is usually to encourage employees to focus their time and effort on high-priority metrics. When this process works constructively, clear performance metrics remove role ambiguity and focus worker energy.

“One of the key things that HR analytics teams want to do is analyse data associated with people’s performance in the workplace and do analysis [to find links] with productivity,” says Professor Edwards.

However, the research found intense measurement of metrics can trigger a secondary, damaging reaction. When tracking intensity escalates, employees engage in calculated self-preservation.

Recognising that their formal appraisals, manager feedback and standing are judged primarily against dashboard metrics, workers rationally shift focus away from unmeasured, yet equally important, duties.

These included:

Mentoring: Providing guidance and development to junior or fellow employees.
Helping a colleague: Assisting co-workers with their tasks, general helpfulness, and day-to-day supportive interactions.
Flagging risks: Proactively identifying, highlighting or reporting potential operational, safety, or organisational risks.

“There’s an old adage that when a measure becomes a metric it becomes a target,” says Professor Edwards. “The more intense these systems are, [the more rational it is] for employees to potentially neglect other aspects, important aspects of the job that aren’t actually being metricised.”

“There is a real danger that these systems end up steering people away from important non-measured behaviors that an organisation would actually want people to be doing in their jobs.”

Downstream effects on engagement and retention

The research also identified another risk. Ignoring the non-metricised tasks and focusing solely on those being monitored left workers less engaged and more likely to quit.

“The metric systems themselves aren’t increasing retention risks,” clarifies Professor Edwards. “It’s when they lead to negative outcomes, and when they encourage employees to start neglecting really important features of their job because they’re so focused on achieving the metrics, then the flow-on associations and effects of that tend to be an increased level of either emotional exhaustion or intent to quit the organisation.”

On top of this, aggressive metrics can damage overall culture.

Displaying daily scores or scan rates on internal leaderboards encourages employees to chase narrow targets, which can undermine collaborative team dynamics.

What is at stake ratchets up massively when metrics are linked directly to pay, escalating the potential for challenging or target-driven behaviour, says Professor Edwards.

He highlights the Australian Banking Royal Commission as a clear example of this breakdown, where tellers were metricised and incentivised on selling financial products.

“Chasing both the metrics, the measures and also the pay ultimately led to challenging and potentially unethical behaviour in the banking system,” he says.

“Evidence to the Royal Commission showed that when Commonwealth Bank removed financial metrics from teller scorecards, teller performance didn’t deteriorate. ANZ piloted collective branch targets in place of individual financial targets in 50 branches. Customer outcomes improved, business performance didn’t drop, and staff preferred it.”

How HR can navigate metricised performance

Metricised performance systems and automated software are becoming standard across HR functions.

However, Professor Edwards and his co-authors emphasise that HR practitioners must carefully manage how these systems are implemented to avoid damaging organisational culture.

This includes considering the following:

Prioritise procedural justice and transparency: Procedural justice acts as a vital buffer against task neglect.

“Transparency in what you’re collecting is a key part of fairness,” says Professor Edwards. “The employee should know exactly what metrics are being collected and how they’re being collected… make it open, transparent.”
Co-design metrics with employees: Organisations should consult employees during implementation.

“Get employees involved in some of that metricisation in the first instance, so the organisation has a reasonable understanding of whether or not the employees feel that the metrics being collected on them are actually fair, reasonable and valid representations of potential features of their performance.”
Avoid metricising every task:

“Some of the things that we’re talking about here – helping colleagues, flagging risks – it’s not the kind of things you really want to be metricising because it could potentially damage the degree to which those citizenship behaviours would occur naturally. You don’t want to turn these things into targets.”
Clearly communicate system intent: Employee reactions to tracking technologies depend largely on why they believe the system was introduced.

“What determined whether or not employees responded badly or positively was their understanding and attribution about why they were being introduced,” says Professor Edwards.

“If they thought the organisation was introducing them as a cost efficiency monitoring control, that led to negative outcomes,” he says “Negative outcomes were less likely if [employees] believed the organisation was doing it to be able to give feedback to the employees for a positive reason, as in systems are in place to let employees know how they are doing in their job so they can understand how to adjust and improve what they are doing.”

Ultimately, collecting employee data is fundamentally different from managing people effectively.

“An HR function will need to be asking themselves, ‘What metrics are we using? Why are we using it? Have we communicated why we’re using it to employees?'” says Professor Edwards.

HR functions should ensure that while automated software tracks digital output, the unmeasured, human contributions that sustain an organisation are never crowded out.

Other co-authors of this research include Associate Professor Stacey Parker from UQ’s School of Psychology, Dr Belen Alvarez Werth from the UQ Business School, Professor Tyler Okimoto from the UQ Business School, and Professor Frederik Anseel from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.