Just to get the elephant out of the living room quickly: to an executive, all these words mean the same thing: “He/she makes money.” That’s it. Productivity means that. Innovation means that. Entrepreneurship means that. Engagement means that. There is no other definition, really, aside from “This person makes money.”
This is a surprisingly nuanced and complicated discussion, though, mostly because we’re at a fulcrum point right now with COVID never-ending. We’re at this moment where a lot of people have reconsidered their connections to work — good! — and we’re framing it around “The Great Resignation,” which is bad (!) because it’s not a real narrative. In the process of all this happening, you also have a movement from “Companies exist to provide returns to shareholders” to “Companies are supposed to be all societal things to all people.” Executives still do not think this way, but we lie to ourselves and claim things are changing. Then the third tier, and perhaps the most powerful tier of the three, is that people need to feel good and relevant and like they’re contributing to something in some way. So even if they suck their thumbs at work all day, they’re going to claim they’re “productive,” because it keeps up the self-narrative they need to have.
All that is to say: we have no idea what “productivity” really means, and in many standard modern work departments, it’s nearly impossible to measure. What is productivity for anything except Ops and Sales? What in the fuck would HR productivity be? What’s DEI productivity? What’s admin productivity? We largely invent that stuff in the interest of seeming “adult” and “professional,” and usually the invented narratives are worse than just doing nothing, which is what many execs would prefer to do — pat HR and their secretaries on the head on December 22nd and hand them a weak-sized check.
Here’s an article where a couple of researchers at Microsoft — again, what would productivity be for a researcher at a huge company? — talk about redefining productivity for the new world of work, and they define it around:
- Well-being
- Collaboration
- Innovation
Good start, but notice all three of these words are suitcase words. They mean different things to different people. For some, well-being means being jacked. For some, it means leaving work at 3:30pm. For some, collaboration is essential; for others it’s forced. “Innovation” has no set definition, and the people with the most clout inside a company will constantly just refer back to money and growth. In fact, one of the big executive arguments for bringing people back to the office is “innovation will suffer,” which is the most hysterical argument of all since many executives have no idea what “innovation” is and cling to legacy products as if they’re a life raft in the Pacific.
The well-being thing is also comical, for a few reasons. First, no senior leaders view well-being as a crisis. They view it as hustling and the cost of doing business. And if they view it as a crisis, the precious few who see and understand work-life balance, they think well-being is something you handle. It’s not the organizational purview or responsibility. And in many ways, they’re right.
So what would be a potential definition of productivity? I’d honestly argue it comes back to feeling like you contribute to a team in some way, regardless of whether you ship or sell widgets, and that you feel proud of and relevant about your performance. That could involve work-life balance, bonuses, nice cars and houses, feeling connected to teammates, etc. The definition will inherently vary by person, as most things in life do. When we try to assign specific boxes to what these words mean, we tend to confuse work even more than it’s already confused — which is a common problem with corporate vocabulary in general.
I know we’re in this moment for people who write about or discuss work to think they need a take on everything, because everything is supposedly changing so quickly, but in reality we don’t need breathless takes and new definitions for productivity. We need to let people set that definition internally — and so long as the organization is making money and can employ them, we’re all good here.
Takes?
