The great productivity myth

The buzzphrase from employees, employers, unions and government is that their idea will positively impact productivity. 

It does not matter if their idea involves working from home, restructuring the workforce or introducing a four day work week. 

Apparently, all these initiatives will increase the output of the worker and/or the organisation.

But (and it’s a huge BUT), as the subheading to this article suggests, no one is measuring the productivity of individual workers now, let alone after the new initiative is implemented.

A century ago, measuring worker productivity was easier. Typically, workers were doing piece work, like picking fruit in an orchard or producing widgets on a production line.

Boxes of fruit per day or number of widgets per day were easily counted and methods could be introduced to increase those numbers i.e. increase productivity.

The complexity of today’s organisations, full of knowledge workers, interacting with technology, and whose performance is connected with a myriad of other people, makes measuring productivity almost impossible.

Productivity at a national or organisational level makes more sense

When our political leaders talk of productivity, they are most likely referring to a measure of our nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, per employed person or per hour worked.

At a national level, this makes sense. Similarly, organisations might measure productivity based on revenue per hours worked or returns from the input of various resources.

Again, this makes some sense when you calculate the revenue from your current workforce and speculate on the changes that might occur if the overall number of workers was increased or decreased.

However, there are no such measures for the average individual knowledge worker.

This became very obvious in the aftermath of the pandemic when many of us glibly announced that “I’m more productive when I work from home”.

This statement was made on the back of notions like “I don’t get as many interruptions from co-workers”, “I’m more relaxed at home”, and “I don’t have to endure the commute to the office”.

None of these propositions has been tested, and, in the absence of a base level of productivity before moving to a working from home model, none of them can assert any links to increased productivity.

Adding further complexity is how having some workers at home impacts the productivity of their co-workers who continue to attend the office.

This isn’t to suggest in any way that working from home or a 4-day work week or any other change to the working arrangement is a bad idea.

What it does challenge is the use of an increase in productivity to justify such a change. 

The multi-dimensional knowledge worker's role

The number of intervening factors that impact the output of a knowledge worker is huge.

At a simple level is the access to appropriate technology, internet speed, workspace set-ups, or current software. More deeply are the intertwined relationships and contributions from co-workers, suppliers, stakeholders or customers.

Each factor can boost output or grind it to a halt, sometimes independent of the contribution of the knowledge worker, hence it is almost impossible to hold individual workers wholly responsible for their own “productivity”.

We can hold individuals accountable for aspects of their role. However, we can’t say with any accuracy that a knowledge worker is currently producing this level of output and with this change in their work environment, they will be producing a higher level of output.

Individuals and organisations should be on the lookout for opportunities to produce more with less – which is possibly the simplest definition of productivity improvement.

The arrival of technologies like artificial intelligence will add yet further layers to the options available to knowledge workers.

Whilst we explore the potential of this and many other changes to our workplace, let’s pause before we automatically attribute positive impact on productivity to the new initiative.