First of all, not every company wishes to incentivize this behavior. Peopleware reminds us that phone calls and other real-time interruptions are big drags on productivity for knowledge workers who need to concentrate. Every time somebody has a verbal conversation to illuminate something unclear, is a time that it wasn't recorded into some kind of documentation that will help future people with the same confusion.

But say you do wish to incentivize that. You can, if you can track the medium of exchange. Take everyone's phone records, reward short conversations, but disincentivize conversations that are too short ("sorry, not now, bye") or too long (social chatting in place of productivity). If you can cost-effectively put it through some kind of ML classifier that could tell you if the conversations were helpful internal support, personal, etc., then all the better. Translate that into some kind of score and factor it into whatever formula that produces personal KPIs.

Not saying it's easy. Just saying it's possible, and it's realistic if you have a team whose full-time job is to come up with these kinds of solutions.

Sorry, I;'m not doing this on the phone. Bob and I are doing this over a quick coffee break, scribbing on the back of a napkin.

Do you seriously want to incentivize productive behavior during people's work breaks? Because that doesn't sound to me like something you want to incentivize (risk of burnout etc.).

No, I'm taking a quick break from my "work" to help a valued colleague solve a problem informally in a way that actually adds more value to the organisation than if I had been sat at my desk. I enjoy the human interaction, its good for my sense of wellbeing. My colleague has his stress levels reduced. We learn a bit about each other's jobs in those 15 minutes and a product is delivered a week earlier than it would otherwise have been.

On the other hand if this is a priority and incentivized, what’s to stop it from going too far, where employees would get extra credit for chatting for entertainment

exactly why this is a good example of an organisational activity that can't be easily measured through simple metrics

Depends, do you want that to happen or not? You seem to be making an assumption this is good, but in some organizations this would be a bad thing to penalize. I'm not sure why you would do this in engineering, but it is important to acknowledge that this isn't a universal good and so maybe your company wants to discourage it for some reason.

Assuming you want people to help each other, you need to capture metrics on it. A few years back I had a metric of helping n people in a different department: I kept track of those interactions so I had something to report at the end of the year.

Was that your personal metrics? Metrics created for yourself are subject to less gaming because when you start lying to yourself about those, you will start to wonder why keep those metrics at all.

If that was a company-issued, top-down metric, I hope it wasn't defined literally as "helping n people in a different department", because that has enough wiggle room to sail an aircraft carrier through. The difficulty of creating a good metric here comes from the difficulty of defining what exactly does it mean, in company context, to "help other people" - and also what it explicitly doesn't mean.

I had to report it to my boss. It was top down, but only a few interactions were required, and it wasn't reported farther up the chain. Because I had to report to my boss, he knew me well enough to judge if it was enough. It was just enough of a metric to ensure people looked for something to bridge a communication gap, without being hard enough that people tried to game it much.

How would you capture those metrics? Requiring people to document all such interactions is impractical, and open to easy abuse.