Can you measure an employee’s work based on one metric alone? 

An employee is more than just a number. An employee is a person that you work with. If you can’t see them with the full breadth of humanity that they deserve, then you shouldn’t be employing them. Sure you have to keep track of performance in someway, but you should have faith in your employees beyond just one metric of their output. You can’t measure everything one way. You need to look at something holistically to get a full picture of what’s going on. But it can be hard to do that when feedback is over-prioritized. That’s what happened to this employee who was, by every other account, a great employee, but got caught up in a few numbers gone wrong. You hope as an employee that your employer sees you for who you are. They see what you bring to the table, and if things are going wrong, you hope that they’ll check in with you and make sure that you’re doing OK. You don’t want to feel like if you make one mistake, you’ll end up on the chopping block. This can be a difficult thing, though, when your employer is looking at numbers to make their decisions. Numbers are useful in quantifying the things that we feel about each other. But they’re not everything.