The TEE Model: Measuring What Metrics Miss

Productivity isn’t just about hours spent — it’s also about the effort behind the work and the ethics guiding how it gets done.

Why Productivity Feels Like a Paradox

When I began my primary research for The Productivity Paradox project, I expected to hear clear answers from senior leaders about how productivity was measured and defined. After all, hospitals and health systems are some of the most metric-heavy environments in the world.

Instead, what I heard was something else: leaders talked about relational and cognitive labor. These are skills that were often instinctive or learned on the job, but rarely codified and taught in medical school or MBA programs. Building trust. Navigating emotions. Mentoring junior staff. Anticipating problems before they surfaced. These were the unseen engines of success, but they weren’t captured in "the data."

The more I sat with this, the more I realized these themes weren’t unique to healthcare. They echoed across the million sources I had pulled from: academic literature, biographies of great leaders, historic industry titans, and organizational studies. Everywhere, the same message repeated: the work that sustains organizations is often invisible to the metrics we use to measure them.

That realization became my impetus. If traditional productivity metrics are failing us, what else should we be looking at to improve our modeling?

The Problem With How We Measure Work

In most workplaces, productivity is defined by what’s easiest to quantify: hours logged, tasks completed, revenue generated. But this narrow view misses the nuance of human work, especially as organizations scale and mature.

• It doesn’t account for the effort behind the numbers.

• It doesn’t capture the ethical decisions that shape whether outcomes are sustainable.

• It leaves entire categories of contribution invisible, like emotional labor, preventative problem-solving, and relationship-building.

The result? Leaders make decisions with only partial data. Teams feel unseen. And organizations chase "productivity" while eroding the very culture that makes it possible.

The TEE Model

The TEE Model (Time, Effort, Ethics) emerged as my attempt to make sense of what was missing.

• Time → The visible hours, deadlines, and schedules, labor. What most organizations measure best.

• Effort → The invisible labor: focus, preparation, mentoring, cognitive load, emotional energy. The things people feel but time that is rarely tracked.

• Ethics → The values guiding decisions: not just can we do this faster or cheaper, but should we? Does this align with our mission and culture?

When productivity is assessed through only one lens--usually time--organizations lose sight of the other two. A healthy workplace requires balance across all three.

Using TEE as an Evaluation Tool

The TEE framework is not meant to replace every existing metric. It’s a lens to evaluate what might be missing from the other meaningful data we are already gathering.

Ask yourself:

• Time: Do our measures only capture speed and quantity?

• Effort: Are we overlooking invisible labor, or undervaluing contributions that don’t show up on spreadsheets?

• Ethics: Are we rewarding shortcuts that conflict with our values or long-term sustainability? If we save on X, do we overspend on Y?

When applied, TEE highlights the gaps. It surfaces the unknowns that organizations often sense but can’t articulate.

What This Looks Like in Practice

• A nurse who takes extra time to calm a patient’s anxiety → invisible effort with ethical weight, not just “minutes on task.”

• An EA who anticipates conflicts in a calendar before the day explodes → effort that prevents wasted time later.

• A product team that delays a launch to protect safety → ethics steering productivity in a direction that’s sustainable.

Traditional metrics would miss these. The TEE model makes them visible.

Capturing More Useful Data for Better Models

If we want productivity models that actually reflect reality, we need to start capturing more than just time and output. The TEE Model offers a roadmap.

• Time (what we already track): Hours worked, deadlines met, project milestones. Useful, but incomplete.

• Effort (often invisible): We can measure signals of effort without micromanaging:

  • Meeting prep and follow-through.

  • Mentorship and peer support logged in systems.

  • Being the quarterback that combines the streams of input across departments

  • Cognitive load indicators (e.g., number of simultaneous systems/tasks).

  • Employee self-reporting on energy drain vs. energy gain tasks.

• Ethics (the hardest, but most important): We can surface values-aligned decisions by:

  • Tracking how often teams delay or pivot work for quality/safety/ leadership reasons.

  • Documenting the distribution of workload (to reveal hidden overperformers).

  • Surveying whether employees feel pressured to cut corners.

This isn’t about making people “feel good.” It’s about making the hard outputs human. A quarterly report may show cost savings, but without context it hides the overtime, the stress, or the shortcuts it took to get there. A project may hit every deadline, but was it carried on the back of one exhausted team member? Was quality sacrificed? Did it erode trust?

By expanding what we capture, we create data that contextualizes the way we work. Not just what was delivered, but the conditions under which it was achieved. Not just the outcome, but the human cost--or the human innovation--that made it possible.

Better data means better modeling. It means leaders can see when success is sustainable and when it’s brittle. It gives us productivity models that reflect the whole picture: time, effort, and ethics working together in the organizational flow.

Why This Matters for Culture

The more I listened in my Productivity Paradox interviews--and the more I reflected on the academic and organizational research I had studied--the clearer it became: productivity isn’t just an output or a disjointed series of throughput. It’s a cultural signal. What we choose to measure communicates what we value.

When leaders measure only time and output, culture becomes frayed. People feel unseen, burnout accelerates, and invisible labor piles up on a few shoulders.

When organizations consider effort and ethics alongside time, culture shifts. People feel their work matters. Values and outcomes align. Teams build trust instead of cynicism.

Closing Thoughts

My research into the Productivity Paradox didn’t give me one neat definition of productivity or the one right way to trim waste. Instead, it gave me a framework and a way to use curiosity to inform what was missing.

The TEE Model (Time, Effort, Ethics) isn’t a magic formula. It’s but a tool to remind us that "productivity" is always bigger than what the existing metrics show. It helps leaders ask better questions, notice invisible contributions, and bring ethics back into the conversation.

The future of productivity isn’t about chasing what’s easy to measure. It’s about paying attention to what’s important, impactful, and often unknown.