Wellness Can't Fix a Measurement Problem

On Wednesday I sat on a panel about women's health and work. Somewhere in the middle of it, I said the thing I actually came to say: none of this is a wellness problem. We were there to talk about PMS, PMDD, and the toll the menstrual cycle takes on a career, and the honest answer is that the cycle is not the part that is broken. The way we measure work is.

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Here is what the room already knew. Close to 1 in 2 women experience PMS. Between 3 and 8% have PMDD, the severe form, and on average it takes 12 years and six different doctors to get it diagnosed. The lost productivity has been priced at more than $4,000 a year per person. Those numbers are real and they are citable, and they are still not the point. They describe one slice. The actual cost is the part nobody puts a figure on.

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Most people have never seen where their own week actually goes. If you want the uncomfortable version, the free Work Receipt shows you in about two minutes.

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Here is what I believe, and it is the thing that turns this from a women's issue into a universal one. Nobody is a flat line across 40 hours a week. Nobody performs at peak for 40 hours, ever. We built workplaces that pretend they do, and then we penalize anyone whose variability is hard to hide. That is not half your team. That is all of your team. Women are simply the most visible casualty, because our variability runs on a schedule and shows up on a calendar. Everyone else's is quieter. It is still there.

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Most founders are not thinking about any of this. The ones who are, usually reach for policy: more sick days, flexible hours, mental health coverage. Those things are necessary. They are also not sufficient, because they treat variability as a deficit you accommodate around, a special case to manage. You can hand someone more sick days and nothing changes, because the incentive structure still punishes the person who takes them. The fix is not a better accommodation. It is a different thing to measure.

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I know what it feels like to be on the wrong side of a system that cannot see you. I once went to a doctor for what turned out to be strep throat and was told it was anxiety. I was given an IUD with no warning that it could cause hormonal acne, and then spent months trying to fix something without knowing what was causing it. The part that does not get talked about is that this is not one bad appointment. It compounds. Eventually you stop going in for things that genuinely need a doctor, because you have learned that showing up costs you more than it helps.

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That is exactly what happens at work. When the system only rewards what it can easily see, people stop surfacing the real thing and start performing the visible version of it. More updates. More meetings. Faster replies. Not because the work needs it, but because that is what gets read as commitment.

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This is worst in tech, and tech built the machine. The whole industry runs on performance theater. Being online late, replying in seconds, showing up to every meeting, all of it reads as dedication and none of it is output. Half the tools we shipped in the last decade were designed to enforce that, not undo it. They measure presence and call it productivity. Until presence stops standing in for performance, no policy will move the number, because you are treating the symptom and leaving the cause alone.

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The change has to happen at the measurement layer, not the policy layer. Stop measuring who was present and start measuring what actually moved work forward, and the whole premise quietly collapses, the one that says showing up at 80% means you are failing. This is the gap a coordination layer is built to close. A coordination layer is the connective software that watches what is actually happening across your tools and turns it into one honest picture of what moved forward, instead of who looked busiest. That is the layer Chambiar is building, and it is why I started this company long before I ever sat on a panel about my own body.

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How do you measure output instead of hours?

You measure output by tracking what actually changed across the tools where work happens, not how many hours someone was logged in. A coordination layer like Chambiar observes activity across connected systems and surfaces what moved a project forward, where time was lost, and where effort went unseen, so people are judged by results instead of visible presence.

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There is a reason this matters to me beyond the spreadsheet. I am a queer Latina woman who built a company about being seen, and I have spent a lot of my life being measured by how well I could perform someone else's idea of a flat line. The people who pay the steepest tax in a system that rewards visibility are the ones whose whole selves do not fit the default it was built around. Pride, for me, is not a logo for one month. It is the same argument as the work one: measure people by what they actually bring, not by how closely they match the shape the system expected.

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The opportunity we are all leaving on the table, because we still measure work in hours instead of in what people produce, is not $4,000 a person. It is incomparably bigger than that. We just have not been counting it.

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I write every week. If you do not want to miss what comes next, subscribe to the Chambiar newsletter on Substack. And if you have not yet seen where your own week is going, the free Work Receipt above is two minutes well spent.