A Better Way to Measure Council Performance

If the public sector adopted just one habit to lift productivity, I'd start here: add a single, simple performance metric alongside the ones we already track.

Right now, most measurement stops at: is it finished? Is it on time? Is it on budget? As councils restructure to meet the Local Water Done Well policy, there's a real opportunity to widen that lens. Alongside delivery, measure Return on Effort — put simply, efficiency. Instead of just counting how many contracts, plans or projects get delivered, measure the resource cost it took to get them there.

That's the mechanism underneath the wider case for measuring council performance differently.

The metric: staff hours spent, relative to the value delivered.

You don't need a precise, universal definition of "value" for this to work — that's for each organisation to decide for its own context. What matters is tracking it consistently over time, because of what the ratio actually reveals: the routine, automatable parts of any piece of work tend to take a fairly fixed, predictable amount of time. The parts that vary — sometimes by hours, sometimes by weeks — are the non-routine decisions: the judgement calls, the escalations, the second-guessing. So when staff hours per unit of value swings around, it's mostly telling you something about decision-making speed, not about the routine work itself. Return on Effort isn't a separate metric sitting next to decision-making speed — it's the practical way to see decision-making speed show up in the numbers, at scale, without timing every individual decision by hand.

Why it matters

We need a healthy tension between avoiding mistakes and spending ratepayer money well. Without an efficiency metric, people will naturally over-analyse to avoid all risk — and that kills speed. This over-analysis is decision friction in its purest form, and it's driven by a perverse incentive: without a countervailing measure of effort, "more analysis" always looks safer on paper than "faster delivery," even when it isn't.

You can see this play out in procurement. Councils often lean on established supplier relationships instead of running a full open tender — for good reason: trust, proven quality, system integration, security of supply. Private businesses make exactly the same call. But without a Return on Effort-style metric, that judgement is hard to defend on paper, even when it's the right call — which quietly pushes staff back toward the slower, fully-compliant tender process by default, simply because it's easier to justify.

Return on Effort is the number you'd see if you tracked decision-making speed across an entire organisation, rather than one decision at a time — see Decision-Making Speed for what's actually driving the variation underneath it.

The organisations that deliver will be the ones pushing speed through a risk-optimisation focus, rather than defeating it through a risk-mitigation one. This is, in effect, what the Friction Factor survey is built to surface: where a risk-mitigation default has quietly become the norm, and what it's costing you in decision speed.