The case that made the confusion visible
Wells Fargo, the bank, fired more than a dozen employees in mid-2024, after investigating allegations that they were using "devices to simulate mouse movements" or other tools to simulate keyboard and mouse activity, creating a false impression of active work while they were away from their computers.
It is worth separating two readings of the episode. The first is the obvious one: people gaming a control. The second is the one that matters: there was a control that could be gamed by a cheap little gadget, and it was being used as evidence of work.
Equating productivity with mouse movement loses the essence of what productivity means. Measures like this do not capture genuine productivity — they promote a culture of surveillance that rewards superficial activity at the expense of meaningful results. And the worst effect is not the employee who cheats. It is the honest employee, who learns that the safe path is to look busy.
Productivity is a ratio, not a sign of life
At its core, productivity is the relationship between the output generated and the inputs used. It is a fraction. It requires two quantities.
If Wells Fargo treated mouse movement as an input, the logical question is: what was the corresponding output? There was none. And the input was so trivial that a simple device could produce it on its own — which is the operational definition of an input with no value.
H. James Harrington, a performance improvement expert, once said: "If you can't measure something, you can't understand it. If you can't understand it, you can't control it. If you can't control it, you can't improve it."
The quotation is often used as a license to measure everything. It says the opposite. Before you start measuring, you have to understand the purpose: why are we measuring this? Does this input have any real value? Without that question answered, measurement does not produce understanding — it produces a report.
The three ways to improve productivity
Productivity encompasses the resources employed — salaries, infrastructure, operating costs — to produce a product or service. There are three ways to improve it:
- Cut costs while holding results steady
- reduce the inputs without compromising the quality or the quantity produced.
- Increase output at the same cost
- raise the efficiency of the inputs to get more results with no additional expense.
- Cut costs and increase output at the same time
- the hardest approach, and the most rewarding.
Notice what the three have in common: all of them operate on a fraction with a numerator and a denominator. Anyone who measures presence has no numerator at all — and measures the denominator badly.
What changed: part of the team has no presence
Up to this point, the argument is the one from 2024, and it was already enough. What changed is that it stopped being an argument and became a physical constraint.
Since 2026, a team can include AI workers: non-human members, hired by you, with a name that shows up on the screens, a job description written by you, a closed set of tools, a work plan with deliverables they answer for, cycles, and an assessment at the end of each cycle.
Now try applying the Wells Fargo method to one of them. There is no mouse to watch. There is no login time, because there is no login. There is no chair, no lunch break, no look of concentration that we unconsciously accept as proof. The entire repertoire of presence signals has nothing to stand on.
It delivers or it does not deliver. That is the only question the machine lets you ask.
And that is why measuring by deliverable stops being a management preference. On a mixed team, any presence metric reaches only part of the people — and it is precisely the part that already resented being measured that way. A ruler that does not reach part of the team is not a conservative ruler. It is a broken ruler.
The trap is back, in new clothes
You would expect the market to have gone straight to the deliverable. It did not. Activity surveillance is back — only now it points at AI.
Tokens consumed. That is cost. It is pure denominator. A team that consumes more tokens is not more productive; it is more expensive. Treating consumption as a result inverts the fraction.
Number of prompts, of calls, of runs. It is the count of how many times someone moved the mouse, under another name. It says activity happened. It does not say what came out of it.
Apply the Harrington test to each one: why are we measuring this, and does this input have real value? Neither of the two survives. Both measure the denominator and call it performance.
The unit that works for both: the deliverable
A deliverable is the product or service generated by a team or unit, resulting from the contributions of its members. Clearly defining and effectively managing deliverables is essential to managing projects or ongoing operational processes. Objectives are about "what" the unit intends to achieve; deliverables are about the "how" — they represent the concrete steps or outputs that lead to reaching the objectives.
A common mistake is to confuse tasks with deliverables. Tasks are the activities needed to produce the deliverable. Where tasks are actions carried out to reach a result, deliverables are the results themselves.
Identifying quantifiable deliverables means defining the tangible products or services that result from the work performed. Being able to identify and define those deliverables precisely can significantly improve the planning and execution phases, leading to greater efficiency and better results.
What makes the deliverable usable as a ruler is not the definition — it is what comes attached to it: an owner, a deadline, and someone who assesses it at the end. Those three things exist the same way for a person and for an AI worker, and that is the only reason the same ruler works for both.
Harrington's question, turned toward your dashboard
Pick the number you look at first thing in the morning to know whether the team worked. Ask it: is this the output or the input?
If it is an input — hours online, messages exchanged, meetings held, tokens, prompts — it does not measure productivity. It measures consumption. And it can be replaced by a little gadget, or by a script, depending on who you are measuring.
The deliverable is the only answer left standing when the worker has no mouse.
References
- The Verge (2024)
- dismissal of more than a dozen Wells Fargo employees after an investigation into devices and apps that simulated activity on the computer.
- H. James Harrington
- performance improvement expert, author of the quotation about measuring, understanding, controlling, and improving.