In 2025, Cambridge Dictionary added over 6,000 new words. One of them was “mouse jiggler”—a device or piece of software used to make it seem as though a computer mouse is moving so that it seems as though you are working when you are not.
It’s a telling addition to the esteemed catalogue. Professionals are increasingly finding clever ways to seem busy when they are, in fact, not. Perhaps they’re grabbing a coffee or squeezing in a quick workout. Meanwhile, common productivity metrics can’t tell the difference.
As a business owner, I see it less as employee subterfuge and more as a broader cultural issue. People are desperate to appear productive all the time. The problem isn’t effort; it’s what organizations decide to measure.
In my experience, measuring the right metrics, from the top down, can shift the way people work, not to mention the transparency surrounding periods when they’re taking much-needed rest or attending to personal matters.
Here’s a closer look at the productivity metrics that matter, as well as those that shouldn’t, at the CEO level.
Rewarding impact, not activity
The value of face time—time spent at the workplace, merely showing your face—is deeply ingrained in our workplace culture. Research has found that leaders perceive employees who were simply observed at work (that is, passive face time) as more dependable or more committed.
Many organizations still rely on outdated proxies for performance, like hours logged, meetings attended, and emails sent—the modern iteration of “face time.” What’s more, they apply the same metrics to all employees, as if disparate groups have the same functions and objectives.
At Jotform, employees work in cross-functional teams. Each sets its own objectives on a mission-based and quarterly basis. They essentially operate as mini-companies within the organization. Employees are expected to work in the office most of the time, because we’ve found that it enhances collaboration, learning, and momentum. But when it comes time to review performance, managers aren’t as interested in the number of hours as they are in measurable business outcomes like revenue growth, margin expansion, customer retention, and speed of execution.
Organizing employees into smaller, cross-functional teams and giving them the autonomy to define their missions and measure success in more specific terms has led to real results. More importantly, it has helped shift the conversation from face time to work that moves the needle.
When busyness becomes the metric
One thing I’ve learned as CEO over the past two decades: employees work toward what organizations reward. When people are rewarded for looking busy, performative work becomes the natural response. What leaders don’t always realize is that they may be incentivizing inefficiency.
Over time, the costs compound. Cultures that reward activity often struggle with burnout, misaligned priorities, and stalled innovation. Teams become busier without becoming more productive. Employees burn out while trying to maintain the appearance of constant activity—and sometimes resort to sneaking away under the radar, aka, quiet vacationing. Innovation slows as people prioritize work that is visible and measurable over work that is meaningful but harder to quantify.
I often think about the story of an acclaimed author who spent days lying on a picnic table, staring up at the sky, figuring out how to piece together an essay. Did he appear productive? No. Was he doing valuable thinking that led to a brilliant outcome? Absolutely.
It falls on leaders to ensure that employees know the metrics that count and recognize how metrics create incentives. At Jotform, for example, we encourage teams to share recent achievements with the entire company during our weekly demo days. Not once has a team shared how late they stayed at an office. Instead, they share product roll-outs that went better than expected; recurring issues that were solved within record time; ideas that bubbled up during quiet (and seemingly unproductive) stretches of deep work. This creates the kind of incentives to produce results that employees want to share, and real motivation around progress and productivity.
Focus on decision-making speed
Another less apparent cause of performative busyness is organizational bottlenecks. When employees are waiting on a sign-off, feedback, or a crucial decision, they’re often stuck in limbo. From the outside, it can look like a productivity problem. In reality, the issue is that work cannot move forward until someone else acts.
The only way to keep tabs on bottlenecks is to track how quickly decisions move through the organization. At Jotform, when bottlenecks appear, I know it’s a workflow problem that requires rethinking the process—not finding one-off tasks for employees to tackle while they wait. I break down the workflow and look at metrics such as the time between identifying an issue and making a decision, the turnaround time for approvals, and the number of decision layers required before work can proceed.
These metrics help leaders identify where progress is getting stuck. Sometimes the fastest way to increase productivity isn’t to ask employees to work harder—it’s to help them spend less time waiting. More importantly, they shift the focus from evaluating individual activity to improving organizational efficiency.
