Signaling and meaning in organizational analytics: coping with Goodhart’s Law in an era of digitization and datafication

Abstract The future of work will be measured. The increasing and widespread adoption of analytics, the use of digital inputs and outputs to inform organizational decision making, makes the communication of data central to organizing. This article applies and extends signaling theory to provide a framework for the study of analytics as communication. We report three cases that offer examples of dubious, selective, and ambiguous signaling in the activities of workers seeking to shape the meaning of data within the practice of analytics. The analysis casts the future of work as a game of strategic moves between organizations, seeking to measure behaviors and quantify the performance of work, and workers, altering their behavioral signaling to meet situated goals. The framework developed offers a guide for future examinations of the asymmetric relationship between management and workers as organizations adopt metrics to monitor and evaluate work. Lay Summary Organizations are increasingly using data about the behaviors of workers to measure, monitor, and evaluate employees’ performance. The goal of these efforts is presumably to develop valid, reliable, and novel insights into work processes. Workers will likely respond to these analytics initiatives by trying to achieve favorable outcomes, but they may do so in ways that confound the goals of organizations using analytics. This article presents three cases where workers communicate about their work in ways that undermine the usefulness of organizational analytics. We position the future of work as a cat-and-mouse game between organizations, seeking to measure behaviors and quantify the performance of work, and workers, altering their behavioral signaling to meet situated goals.