Napping or thinking?
Productivity is a systemic problem, not a personal one
To some of us, increasing productivity means being more efficient so we can clock off earlier and recharge our batteries. Shareholders will be much more interested in how employees can increase output this quarter with fewer resources than last quarter.
Whichever lens we look through, we are failing badly. The UK has one of the worst productivity rates in the developed world. According to the Office for National Statistics, the average output per worker for the G7 nations is 16% higher than ours.
What’s the cause? Lack of investment and staff shortages are frequently cited, but workers get the blame too, especially since hybrid ones. The Victorian belief that workers are naturally lazy still pops up in contemporary rhetoric. Ignoring the research, some leaders still feel that people only work when you watch them.
Political discourse often refers to ‘hard working families’, implying that as long as we work hard, we’ll get the rewards we deserve. If we are struggling, it’s our fault for not working hard enough.
Liz Truss, UK Prime Minister for 49 chaotic days, blamed the nation’s productivity problems firmly at the door of ‘lazy idle workers’. In a book she co-authored with four other MPs, she wrote that “once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.”
Ouch. Employees in the UK already work some of the longest days in Europe, averaging around 36.5 hours per week, with many reporting much longer days. Must we all work even harder?
Liz having a career rethink
The knowledge productivity battle isn’t personal
The burden of improving organisational productivity still lies mostly with the individual. We expect staff to organise themselves pretty much, to ‘optimise their time’, with relatively little practical help from their manager, who probably feels under water too. Unless we work in manufacturing, we don’t like to talk about time and efficiency. Managers have no idea how long tasks should take, so they can only estimate if they are under-resourced, depending on how individual team members craft their jobs.
Chances are, your people are working really hard for you, but on the wrong thing.
Even if we are personally productive, the systems we work in are frequently inefficient and get in our way. We are dragged down with too much information and distracted by unimportant but urgent work. The more of it we do, the more unnecessary work we cause for everyone else. We feel like losers in a game of Whack a Mole, with everyone wanting a piece of us. We are up against the system, and we can’t keep getting up earlier and earlier to fight it.
We are overwhelmed by avalanches of emails and messages and endless lists of things to do. Excessive layers of complexity compound to slow down decision making and action. If you want to get something done, you need multiple meetings and sign-offs. Collaboration tools distract us. Post-pandemic it’s not uncommon for people to spend their core working day in meetings, deciding what they’d do, if only how they had time to do it.
Growing pains
When companies grow past starter size, they add extra layers of management and more business units. The founder gets further from the coal face and the entrepreneurial energy of getting things done diminishes. New managers, often trained in large corporates, deliver what they know best: processes and hierarchy. An admirable desire for inclusivity is often taken too far. Everyone has a say and the buck stops nowhere.
Eventually the bloated organisation drifts away from its original purpose: the customer, patient, clients, stakeholders it vowed to serve.
How do you fix the system?
Organisations are groups of people sharing information. We are warm sentient bodies, not human capital. Shared values and purpose create an inspiring culture, which should be laser-focused on achieving that purpose.
And where does it all start? With the people at the top of the chart. If we want more productive cultures, leaders must get a grip of the real productivity blockers, not blame the hard-working, under-resourced people doing their best whilst mired in overwhelm and complexity.
Leaders must step up and manage time and energy far more intelligently, as competently as they protect their money and other assets. Technology and artificial intelligence will give us competitive advantage, but we must respect the boundaries and needs of the people that use it. Only when leaders stop complaining about staff shortages and talent scarcity will we know that business success relies on machines, not people. In the meantime, we must put people front and centre.
I don’t mean group-hug, wishy-washy policies here. I mean changes that speed up workflow and make life easier, for instance:
- Culling distracting communication channels
- Halving the number of internal meetings and restricting use of powerpoint
- Updating job descriptions to clarify current priorities
- Respecting planning and focus time
- Having a ‘phone first’ policy instead of emails and meetings
- Insisting on meeting agendas
- Removing shared calendars
- Use RACIs to define accountability and ownership
- Streamlining clunky processes
- Improving onboarding to reduce transition time
- Better training for all, particularly first time managers
- Bringing back team lunches
- Banning meetings that are merely information sharing and using alternative methods to communicate
- Encouraging asynchronous working and sprints to achieve high priority tasks
You can speed up the system if you have the courage to challenge it. I ran some Crazy Busy masterclasses in a university this year and heard about quarterly governance meetings that lasted at least three hours and generated over 400 pages of minutes.
Now individual presentations at these meetings are timed to three minutes maximum, instead of at least ten. Other governance meetings copied their new format. Time is freed up and the poor minute-taker can get on with their real work, because they’ve been largely replaced by transcription software.
Change happens like this when brave people chip away at the parts of the system they can influence. What difference would it make to your business if you removed the productivity blockers?
I can start the process for you. Click here for my brochure, including Crazy Busy sessions for leaders and teams, and book me for your autumn conferences.
Warm wishes
Zena
Zena Everett: Speaker on Crazy Busyness and Productivity Drag,
Author of The Crazy Busy Cure, winner at the Business Book Awards
Coaching and Speaking: www.zenaeverett.com
Email me: zena@zenaeverett.com
Call me: +44 7968 424650
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