Effort, Impact, Attraction: The Missing Signals in Role‑Based Work
Adding effort, impact and attraction to every role turns static definitions into actionable decisions about capacity, outcomes and motivation in role‑based organisations. On Keyroles, these three signals complement role definitions to reflect reality, process tensions and scale clarity across Holacracy, Sociocracy and beyond.
Modern role-based organisations thrive on clarity that you can act on, not just elegant role statements. This is why Keyroles pairs a role definition with three pragmatic properties: effort, impact and attraction. This reflects how real teams manage tensions and develop governance in a practical, step-by-step manner.
Effort: capacity and realism
Effort captures the time that a role owner actually invests each week, providing leaders and circles with a realistic view of capacity before commitments are made. In knowledge work, capacity planning is both essential and uncertain, so identifying the number of hours allocated to each role helps to avoid overcommitment, burnout and the invisible workload. Guidelines show that healthy utilisation ranges and forward visibility into hours improve allocation and reduce bottlenecks. This depends on knowing the amount of effort required for each role, even if only approximate.
Impact: outcomes over output
Impact expresses the value that a role delivers through its work, enabling teams to prioritise by outcome (for example, using the well-known impact–effort matrix). This straightforward approach improves decision-making, allocating scarce resources to high-leverage work while highlighting quick wins without losing sight of strategic goals. When combined with capacity practices, impact ensures that portfolios or teams remain on strategy rather than being overly busy, guaranteeing that the right work is carried out at the right time.
Attraction: energy, fit and engagement
Attraction indicates how much a role owner likes their role. This is a proxy for energy and intrinsic motivation, which predicts better performance over time. Research on job crafting shows that enabling individuals to customise their tasks and relationships enhances engagement and performance, a process that is facilitated by attraction signals prompting redesign or reassignment. Decades of fit research and large-scale engagement meta-analyses have shown that a good fit between a person and their job (aka. owning a key role) leads to better outcomes, making attraction a practical leading indicator of role health.
Why the trio matters together
- Without effort, impact becomes busywork; without impact, effort becomes fantasy planning; and without either, attraction can burn energy on the wrong work.
- Tracking all three creates a living dashboard for governance, showing where effort is maximised, amplifying roles with high impact and redesigning or rotating low-attraction roles to recover engagement.
- Over time, these signals reduce overlaps, clarify expectations and speed up the onboarding process. New team members can see what a role involves, how much time it requires, why it is important and what type of person would thrive in it.
Keyroles supports Holacracy, Sociocracy and other frameworks in which accountabilities are ‘allocations of attention’ and tensions drive continuous change. Treating effort, impact and attraction as first-class role properties transforms these changes into measurable progress, while ensuring that teams remain aligned as they grow or merge. The result is a governance copilot that couples clear responsibilities with capacity, outcomes, and human motivation. This is precisely what modern organisations need to stay adaptive.
