A record is never supplied to assess the person.
Not to an employer. Not to an insurer. Not to anyone. No ranking, no grading, and no comparing you against your own earlier work. That is a refusal rather than a setting, and it is not on the table in any agreement we sign with anybody.
If you are going to distrust one thing on this site, distrust this one.
A company is writing down how you work. Of course the first question is whether it ends up as a file on you.
The suspicion is well earned, and it is not paranoid. Almost every time a person's work has been measured at any scale, the measuring turned into a ranking, and the ranking turned into a decision about the person: who gets the good ground, who gets the call in a slow winter, who gets the conversation in the office. Nobody sets out to build that. It drifts there, because a number is easy to sort by and a person is not.
So the answer cannot be a promise to behave well. A promise to behave well lasts as long as the people who made it, and you have no way to hold anybody to it. The answer has to be a plain statement of what is never handed over and to whom, written into the paper rather than posted on a wall. Here is that statement, and it is the whole of it.
A record is never supplied to assess the person — not to an employer, not to an insurer, not to anyone.
Nobody gets a report about how you are doing.
Not a rating, not a grade, not a trend line, not a quiet word to somebody who asked. Here is the list, in the plainest words we can put it in.
- No report to your employer about how you work, how you compare to the next hand, or how you have changed.
- No report to an insurer. Not about you, not about your crew, not about anybody.
- No ranking of one person against another, and no list sorted by anything at all.
- No comparing you against your own earlier work. Nobody is told you have slowed, tightened up, got better or got worse.
- No score. There is no number anywhere in any of this that is a score for you — not held back for our own use, not internal, not switched off for now.
- No supplying it to anybody else who asks, whatever their reason and however the request is dressed up.
The last one is worth sitting on. A thing that does not exist cannot be leaked, sold, or switched on later when the people change or somebody buys us. A thing that exists but is withheld is a thing somebody can change their mind about. The point is not that the score is kept in a locked drawer. There is no score in the drawer.
What does travel
Hours. The name your way of working runs under, the machine and the job it ran on, when it started and when it stopped, and the name of the person on that crew who cleared it. A count of hours is not an opinion about a person: it says what was used and for how long, and there is nothing in it that could be turned into a claim that you are any good or that you are not.
And what the checks look at
Before anything is built from a recording, it is accepted or refused, and a refusal names its reason. Every one of those reasons is about equipment or paperwork — a gap in what was written down, an agreement that was not in force on the day, a fitting that cannot be shown. None is about how you worked. A refusal is not a mark against you and it goes nowhere.
Every measure you could rank by turns on you when the ground goes bad.
This is not only a refusal. It is also the reason a score would be worth nothing to the person who wanted one.
Buckets an hour rewards the hand who does not stop to look. The careful one works slower, corrects more, and reads as the worse of the two right up until the quick one is in the water. Fuel, cycle time, idle time: every one of them measures the half of the job anybody can do, and every one of them gets it backwards on the day it matters.
The part that is actually worth something shows up as things that did not happen. The bank that did not slump. The old line nobody marked and nobody cut. The machine that came home. There is no number beside a thing that did not happen, and a day where nothing went wrong and a day where somebody quietly stopped it going wrong look identical on a timesheet.
So a way of working is asked for by name, and a person on the crew picks it by name before a job. That is the measure this runs on, and it is the one that holds when the ground does not. Nothing here sorts people, because there is nothing to sort them by that would survive a wet week.
It is not a preference, and it cannot be bought out.
A setting can be changed by whoever holds the keys. A term has to be renegotiated with everybody who signed it, and this one is not on offer to renegotiate.
A promise that lives in a policy page lasts as long as the people who wrote the policy page. It goes first when money is tight, when the people change, or when somebody big enough asks nicely. So this one does not live there. It is written into every licence we grant, before anything is signed, in the same words on every copy.
Nobody licensing a way of working is offered a way to ask for an assessment of the person. It is not a feature switched off, not an upgrade, not something a large enough order opens the door to. There is no version of the paper in which it appears, so there is nothing for a customer to push on and nothing for us to give away under pressure.
If a company wants to measure its own people, it can do that the way it always could, with its own equipment and its own arrangements with them. That is between them and their crews. Nothing we hold feeds it, and no request of that kind gets a different answer for being a big one.
You do not have to take our word for any of this, and you should not have to. The same refusal is in the agreement you sign, which is the copy that is yours and the one worth reading. That agreement is with Even Steven. We never ask you to sign anything, nothing on this site is an offer to you, and a question about your own paper is not one we would be the right people to answer.
Read the refusal in the paper that is yours.
Your name, your permissions, your count, your money and this refusal all sit in one agreement, and it is with Even Steven. Take it there, and read it before you sign rather than after.