Are We Productive?
Many of the management teams we talk with are suspicious about productivity with remote or hybrid work. We hear statements like “People just can’t be productive working from home.” If we ask for a specific story or metric that has shown the light on this lack of productivity, they are rarely able to come up with anything evidence-based. I’m not sure what they would come up with because most companies don’t have a way to measure productivity for non-production-based workers. Most knowledge-based workers are tied to multi-disciplinary project teams with many dependencies so it’s not always easy to measure any one person’s specific output.
I was listening to Tim Ferris and Cal Newport on Tim’s podcast to discuss Tim’s book “The Four Hour Work Week”. The two gurus of work and life note how ‘productivity’ as a movement has come and passed. I completely agree with Tim and Cal, but the word itself is still used by execs all around to discuss how workers are faring in the hybrid and remote world. The multi-tasking, powerful productive caffeine-laced worker is just out of touch with any performance science. It persists as an unconscious ‘ism’ by management teams. Of course, you need people to produce what they are asked to do, but the ‘productivity’ we hear is more about work style than output.
I’m not a psychologist but we all know that there are probably two key issues underlying the ‘my people aren’t productive’ mantras: clarity of expectations and accountability. I didn’t say trust because I believe you will experience trust when people know exactly what they are expected to do and are held accountable to those expectations. The reality is most companies don’t really know if people are productive, they just know whether they think people are getting work done how they want them to.
There are 100 feet of books that have tactics for building clarity and accountability. What we have become interested in is how to create the space for your people to perform.
Productive Capacity
Work is not sports. However, we find it useful to look at other sectors where they are ahead of the curve in specific areas like performance. Today in professional sports pro athletes are surrounded by experts in every part of their profession from health, fitness, nutrition, skill development, game understanding, and more. The team, i.e., their employer, doesn’t prescribe all the ways that each area of their development should be done. Of course, in team sports, it’s critical for the team to be together to build chemistry and understanding of how they play together, but it’s not even the bulk of the time the player spends on their professional development.
Pro sports teams have been moving away from a paternalistic we know the best model to a resource access model. In a resource access model, each player is given ample chances to develop self-awareness of their needs and then shown where those resources can and will be available. Sports management is removing roadblocks from a player's access to the best tools and training. Historically teams (even ones you might have played on) would prescribe a workout for the entire team to do, when to do it and how to do it. The science and data began to show that personalization of development and functional training reaped much better results than a single formula for all players. It makes sense that the defensive lineman needs to have different skills and fitness than the quarterback.
The resource access model builds more capacity for quality time for players. There is no excuse for access to the tools, it’s on you for the accountability. There is more to this approach than protecting the downside, it’s creating exponential upside. The removal of roadblocks allows for the focus on the performance of each area of development. Focus takes constant practice, but all the science shows that your ability to point your attention more frequently in a single direction will produce higher quality results in shorter amounts of time.
Work Productivity Capacity
At work, we don’t how we are often doing the opposite of creating a capacity for productivity. Even well-meaning tools like Slack introduce social media-like addictions on top of already terrible work habits. Tim Ferris reminded me in his discussion that not only the expectation of response, but a lot of the ‘work’ people are doing is unnecessary or poorly designed.
Email is a huge stressor for many people. Cal and Tim revisit email in-depth in the podcast and I suggest you listen to their discussion. Email is a terrible medium for knowledge sharing, but it’s still a primary medium for most companies to do both internal and external communication. When we started Align we decided on no internal email. It sounds radical, but it’s not as hard as you might imagine. Because of this work practice, there isn’t anyone in the company that should struggle to be at inbox zero or let alone need to be checking email all the time. It’s not that we don’t communicate, we just put it in other places and it’s all 100% asynchronous. The only synchronous medium is text and phone and that’s only when people have declared they are available.
Our data shows that the main barriers to flow for workers are digital notifications, coworker interruptions, and urgent work requests. All these types of behaviors lower the capacity for productivity. These are some of the examples of roadblocks that we unintentionally put in front of people, and it reduces their ability to be at peak performance. When we ask ourselves whether a person or team can be productive in a work situation like remote or hybrid, we aren’t simultaneously asking which roadblocks are removed or enhanced by each situation.
The work resource access model isn’t dissimilar to professional athletes. The resource access model is which tools, practices, and spaces you need to increase the capacity for productivity. Once you know what drives that the decision as to the home, office, or hybrid is clear and maybe different for different people.
If you can generate clarity and accountability the main feature of a thriving work experience is its capacity for productivity. The culture you want is the one where people are empowered to do their best work.
