Productivity theater: why is busyness mistaken for productivity?
Busy is a decision at home. Busy is a design at work.
When was the last time you’ve heard someone say “I’m NOT busy”?
Stephen Covey and great stoics such as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius would agree that there are things we control and those we do not. Debbie Millman, a designer, writer, and educator is known for her view that busy is a decision. Yes, we can choose between Robert Greene’s alive time vs dead time, Erich Fromm’s activity or passivity, family, books, rest.
But the decision about busyness is limited to our personal lives. The reality at work offers much less agency. Aristotle practicing a virtue of contemplation at today’s workplace would be fired more or less kindly and asked to go practice somewhere else.
Busy is a decision at work, but it’s not our decision. Busy is a design at work. Why? It starts with recognizing that our definition of productivity is wrong.
Busy = working = productive?
We mistaken busyness for productivity. As Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister point out in their classic book Peopleware:
Productivity ought to mean achieving more in an hour of work, but all too often it has come to mean extracting more for an hour of pay.
Why do organizations use utilization as a proxy for productivity?
- Because it seems to make sense — someone working for 8h, must be delivering more value than someone working for 5h, right?
- Because the opposite seems like an obvious waste. “What do you mean we have two employees idle for 4h?”
- Because utilization is easier to measure than business outcomes. “How many hours did you work for today?” vs .“What did you achieve today? How much is that worth?”
- Because it’s easy. It doesn’t require us to look at the entire organization’s value stream or to even know what a value stream is.
- Because it’s how we used to do it in the past and it really made sense then.
Work yesterday vs work today — in the past work was visible and predictable.
Work at the assembly lines is tangible. We can see how the products move if we make more or less of them. I.e. we can see if the work happens or not. Moreover, such work is predictable and of low variability. We know exactly how the end product should look like, and how long it should take to produce. Therefore not only can we measure workers' productivity by the time worked, but also pay them by the hour. Scientific Management System, aka Taylorism, is a tool that worked well in that era.
When work is invisible we show that we work by appearances
Today more people work with knowledge and knowledge is neither visible nor predictable.
“The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and knowledge workers.”
Peter F. Drucker
As knowledge workers, when asked about what we’ve achieved today, we cannot just show the pins and widgets we produced lying on our desks.
We show that we’re working by participating in a productivity theater. We demonstrate being busy. We send emails, chats, have meetings, stay online longer than bosses, even if there is no actual work for us to do.
By doing all of that we don’t have time to do the actual work. We’re doing less work, not more. Creativity requires space, we need time for deep work to thrive.
Productivity theater is reinforced by the lack of trust
Theory X of management assumes that workers do not like their work, are lazy, and look only for their self-interest. Therefore, they must be managed with an authoritarian style which can be summarized as “I don’t trust you, so I will be constantly watching you”.
Unfortunately, this management style not only did not go out of fashion but is still common today.
COVID-19 lockdown has been a big trust exercise. Managers suddenly could not physically supervise the work. The theater has moved to a virtual world and could not be observed in person Their fear was that without supervision working from home would surely mean no work getting done and Netflix all day. It was one of the reasons why some were not allowing their employees to work remotely before. So what has happened? Were their fears justified?
Turns out nothing of the kind happened. A recent survey by Mercer and HR firms revealed productivity was the same as or higher than it was before the pandemic, even with their employees working remotely.
A step forward. Maybe we will see less micromanaging. Maybe some managers have realized that work still happens when nobody’s looking, and that we don’t need to know the effort in minutes if we can all see the outcome.
Yet, there is a question mark behind the pandemic remote work productivity– have we worked fewer hours in the lockdown?
Have we managed to be equally productive with less of a theater when working remotely, or have we replaced one theater with another?
For example, one leading to what is known as a Zoom Fatigue?
What should we do about it?
- Don’t play in the productivity theater. It’s ok to say no. Sometimes we just need to curb our superhero egos and be part of the solution, not the problem.
- Measure Outcomes over Output — i.e. things that truly matter to the business, not a direct output of our work that might or might not deliver value.
- Aim at aligned-autonomy — discuss and agree on the destination, trust with the journey to get there.
- Respect others, by letting them work and keeping interruptions to a minimum. Don’t expect the always-on and real-time responses — see: How Slack Ruined Work
- Redesign the Operating System behind how we work that relies on multitasking and overutilization.
This article is part of the series on how organizations can make work flow with lean, agile and common sense, but not common practice. You might also like:
