The cost
What it does to people
People stop doing permitted things because they cannot predict how it will be read. Nothing in any report shows it.
The Chilling Effect, Specifically
People stop doing permitted things because they are unsure how it will be read. The behaviours are predictable and each has an operational cost.
Dignity at Work, Defined Usefully
The word appears in every ethics discussion and does no work there. Here is a version of it that produces different decisions.
What People Stop Doing
Six behaviours that disappear under observation, each of which the organisation depends on and none of which appears in any measure.
Being Measured Against a Standard You Cannot See
An unpublished threshold is an unfair one, regardless of where it is set, and the unfairness is structural rather than a matter of degree.
The Accumulation Nobody Decided On
No single measure is unreasonable. The sum of them is a working life nobody would have proposed, and the sum is what people experience.
Trust, and Why It Does Not Recover Quickly
The asymmetry between losing and rebuilding is not sentiment. It follows from what the two processes actually require.
The Costs That Appear on No Account
Six consequences that are real, consequential and absent from every business case written for a monitoring system.