Let’s Go Round Again
One of the lines I use to show why we need to Decrapify Work is that productivity has been practically flatlining for the past decade (since the Global Financial Crisis in 2008).
The typical measure of productivity at the country level is GDP per hour worked, and for the company it is revenues per hour worked. Whilst this worked OK for an industrial society, where output was mostly physical products, it seems rather less satisfactory for a knowledge economy, much less for the type of economy we are moving towards (whatever that turns out to be).
In my working lifetime I have seen the introduction of a mind-boggling array of ‘personal productivity tools’ and the development of the internet. We can literally run a business from a device in our pocket, from anywhere in the world. Yet are we more productive? Or are we just running around in different circles, at a faster and faster pace?
Is increasing productivity even a sensible goal anymore? The logical endpoint of that is to have a fully automated system that requires no human intervention at all, and then we’ll have infinite productivity. And whilst there are certainly some bros’ in Silicon Valley for whom that is a personal nirvana, I’m not sure that’s where the rest of us want to end up.
Me, Myself, I
So let’s look at personal productivity. How much of what we do at work is actually productive?
We know there’s a huge amount of busy-work going on. Emails, chat messages, reports, general bureaucracy and, of course, meetings can fill up as much time as you’ve got and make you feel busy, but this work doesn’t actually achieve anything.
I think ‘zero inbox’ is the most stupid idea I have ever heard of. It’s the epitome of ‘busy-work’, an utterly pointless objective that can consume huge amounts of effort, attention and time for no tangible benefit. I’ve had email since the early 1980s, I’ve developed and launched many email products and services and the only time I’ve ever had a zero inbox is when I opened one up for the first time (actually, that’s probably not true as people like me decided we should auto-generate a welcome message so you have something to look at …)
How do you even gauge if you are productive? I spent most of my career working on projects, programmes or developing products, where there was a defined objective to work towards. This is a linear process, you can (kind of) measure your progress towards it. One step leads to another and eventually you deliver the outcome. However, a lot of ‘work’ isn’t like that.
Since leaving to work for myself, I have had to go and get sales, and I’ve found that doesn’t work in a linear way at all. You basically do a bunch of stuff and hope some of it leads to enough people buying enough stuff from you to hit your target. You can’t tell which thing you do will lead to a sale and it’s entirely possible that you can do loads of work that produces absolutely nothing.
So how do I tell if I’m being productive by doing sales activity? I have to believe that if I take lots of actions they will lead to the end result I want. It is quite hard to connect a sale with the actions that led to it, if not impossible. The linkages are obscure and quite loose, so I can spend a lot of time on unproductive things before I have the faintest idea they don’t work.
The same is true about innovation, I have to run a lot of experiments to find out what works and it may all lead to failure. So is that productive?
Or is it just that I can tick things off my ‘to do’ list, which serves the process, and so I can call that productive?
And then we’re back at zero inbox.
Looking For Clues
In reality, individual productivity is assessed fairly subjectively by managers. Often ‘hours worked’ is taken as a proxy for productivity, which leads to a culture of presenteeism and long hours. It also creates the paradox where those who are actually less productive take longer to achieve the results, have to work longer hours and so are perceived as being harder working and, by implication, more productive.
This is overlaid by an impression created through performative busyness and ‘face-time’ (or networking, if you want to dress it up a bit).
None of this is actually connected to effectiveness (except, arguably, negatively).
So if we’re so bad at measuring productivity, what should we measure?
The latest view is that hybrid working will force companies to focus on outcomes rather than hours (or all the performative nonsense). So KPIs and OKRs should come into play, which is certainly an improvement. However, managers are not necessarily very skilled at using these, and in a volatile environment, these may not actually be relevant for very long. And how do they work in situations where the outcome is emergent (which is increasingly likely to be the case)?
Steve Blank’s Customer Development model starts with a ‘search’ stage, where product-market fit is discovered through prototyping. He makes the point that applying traditional business metrics at this stage is pointless and will likely prove fatal. The only thing that should be ‘measured’ is learning. As long as each experiment produces learning which is acted upon, then that’s a productive outcome.
This applies to creativity generally, which is going to become an increasing part of everyone’s work and the source of value creation. (And the thing that can’t be automated away).
So perhaps we should stop measuring productivity (or what we think is productivity) and start measuring learning instead.
Not a new idea. Peter Senge wrote his book ‘The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization’ in 1990. So maybe the time has come for this idea to take hold.
Although, as I wrote in my LinkedIN post recently, what the science tells us and what actually happens in organisations is not only different but often the complete opposite.
Not much learning going on at the moment.
Back To Black
Which neatly brings me to the current soap opera that is ‘The Return To The Office’.
Man, I’m getting bored with hearing CEOs and City Mayor’s come out and demand that people go back to the office to ‘revive the economy/culture/city centre/coffee shops/transit systems/other random shit’.
For two years people have worked from home, performed heroics, not only kept businesses going but increased productivity (fancy that!) and profitability. Despite the enormous stresses of a global pandemic, COVID restrictions, home-schooling, caring for sick relatives and all sorts of emotional, psychological and physical pressures. And they’d like to keep doing it, for some of the time at least.
They got given the trust and autonomy to arrange their work and integrate it into their lives on their terms and they liked it. It was a win-win.
But no, overpaid, out-of-touch, tin-eared ‘leader’ after ‘leader’ have come out and insisted they need to get back in the office. Most have now dropped the intensely insulting ‘Return to Work’ (although they’re still thinking it. And we know they’re thinking it.) but what they are saying is still loud and clear.
“We don’t trust you. We don’t care about your personal lives. We had to treat you as adults but now we want you back where we can treat you like children again.”
And just to underline it, Google are giving their employees free e-scooters! You couldn’t make this up, could you?
They have learnt nothing from the past two years and they will pay a price for their ignorance.
It might even damage their productivity 😮