Productivity Does Not = “Busyness”
The rise and use of the term, “Productivity”
Once upon a time, we lived in industrial, manufacturing world…long, long ago…or at least back to early 1900s. Most work was physical, people were co-located, outputs were transactional, capacity and cost were monitored and measured by “productivity”. Productivity measured the number of units that could be produced over a set timeframe at a set cost. Companies had simple ways of measuring output needed to compete and cost impacts.
Over time this measurement became so prevalent it became the way workers were monitored and valued. Managers could see through data points which team members were high producers and reward them, while releasing those not producing. This worked out well for the industrial, physical working world until the digital transformation, 4th Industrial revolution started in the early 1970s and continues today.
The shift in use and meaning begins…
The digital revolution pivoted many workers to call centers, contact centers, internet channels and software portals. We now had people working in various locations, time zones and countries. People shifted to working on computers vs physical machinery. The productivity metrics still tended to apply, as much of this work was transactional in nature: (examples)
# calls, transactions
Talk-time
Abandons and disconnects
Time on site
Reason for contact
As the digital revolution accelerated, the promise of digital began to materialize, automating transactional activities allowing customers to self-help, freeing up workers to focus on complex problem solving and solution development, transactional measures stopped being a good fit for defining value or managing capacity.
The evolution of knowledge workers had begun.
Using a transactional metric to measure Knowledge workers value doesn’t work.
So, what is a knowledge worker…not all digital workers are knowledge workers. The technology industry describes “A knowledge worker”, is a professional who generates value for the organization with their deep expertise, critical thinking and interpersonal skills”. These people are highly adoptable and typically are involved in improving or developing new products or services, problem-solving, or creating strategies and transformation plans to help companies to compete in the digital global era.
The evolution of the knowledge workers has created a challenge for many managers/leaders who continued to try to monitor and manage through transactional productivity measures.
Many companies struggle to decentralize decision making or allow teams to be a bit more autonomous. They continued to try to find tactical transactional measures to “monitor” what workers were doing. As a result of this disconnect, there is a rising lack of trust between employees and employers. Instead of measuring customer focused outcomes required to compete in the digital workspace, many managers are staying in their comfort zone with “Activities”. This conflict in expectations has continued to accelerate since the Covid pandemic ended. After years of working remote and getting work done, many companies are back peddling to monitor activities:
Features delivered
# Card swipes
Time on keyboard or keystrokes
Log in and log off times
These metrics do not measure value. Suddenly being productive, has transitioned to meaning “Busyness”. The busier you appear the more “valuable” managers/ leaders think you are. Company time and money is being shifted to monitor what employees are doing vs enabling them to better delivery value to customers. Wells Fargo recently made headlines for firing employees who used “jigglers” to simulate keystrokes. A symptom of a company that may not have the right measures in place to hire or challenge workers to deliver value.
Time to shift from our obsession with looking busy to delivering value. The lack of focus is impacting many companies’ ability to compete in the global digital modern world. Too many organizations are falling back to using units and time as a measure and it only to add cost and frustration in the workplace. Time in hours is not a baseline to monitor customer centric value. Productivity is not applicable to knowledge workers in its current state.
“More frequent delivery of the wrong stuff is not the right answer.”
“Doing to do, is not valuable or productive”
We need to rethink what “idol time” and “wait time “means in the modern world of work as it applies to innovation, creativity, collaboration and the knowledge workers. We are no longer working on a linear assembly line model. “We cannot lean out thinking”…
Look for our next blog: “Monitoring & Measuring Contributions of Knowledge Workers”
About the Author:
Cat Collins has been a pioneer in business digital transformation for 30 years. Her focus is on organizational, service, functional and experience design, enabled by emerging digital technology. She has held executive positions in global companies and consulting firms. Her background in psychology/business and hands-on digital transformation experience, have guided her to an innovative human-centric approach to successfully develop solutions and products while helping people transition to new ways of working.