What is Productive Behaviour – A Provocation

What is Productivity?

In our work, we often ask people to explore what they are doing when they feel they are being productive. A lot of the answers we get are linked to what we consider to be “getting stuff off of our to-do lists”. What is missing, though, in what people perceive as productive activity are the majority of “investment” activities that help create better future outcomes for ourselves and our teams. Specific things that are missing include things like getting to know your colleagues, investing in your wellbeing, stepping back and pausing so you have time to digest and reflect on what really matters, and so on. These factors are important everywhere, but they’re particularly important to consider when we work in complex environments and in remote or hybrid teams. For many individuals, the current way of thinking about productivity is neither helpful, nor sustainable. Jaime Teevan puts it well in her quote below:

We must expand the way we think about productivity to focus on well-being, social connections, and collaboration and the innovation they bring to drive business success.

Jaime Teevan – Chief Scientist – Microsoft

So what should we do about this?

As individuals, we should be clear on the benefit of investing time and energy in areas like our wellbeing, our connections with colleagues and clear prioritisation of what matters. Of course, this is often hard to do if our organisations and leaders do not create the space for this and if they do note design roles in such a way that allows for these investments. It follows that leaders and managers should design work and roles in such a way as to provide space for and to reward these productive, investment behaviours. In addition, leaders and managers should strive to great healthy workplace cultures that promote behaviours like this (within reason) and they should also role-model productive behaviours themselves.

Learning More

This reflection is particularly relevant for hybrid and remote teams and you might enjoy this article on some history of agile working this one on some basic agile working practices (sometimes remote and hybrid work was described as agile, before the pandemic). This piece on BCGs Remote Pyramid (critical success factors for remote teams) might be useful too. As this way of thinking about productivity is also important in complex contexts, we think VUCA is also interesting. More broadly, it might be worth looking at Bullshit jobs as, if we don’t focus on the right type of productivity, we’re likely to create them. In addition a general focus on wellbeing can be helpful. We think John Adair’s Action Centred Leadership is a great model to help us focus on what matters regarding productivity, but we haven’t written about it yet.

The World of Work Project View

There is always a balance to be struck with things like this. While it’s clearly very important to be doing these investment behaviours, it’s also important to be delivering in the present for our clients and customers. Part of the role of a manager is to understand these different dynamic pressures and to adjust the way their team uses their time and energy to ensure the best long-term outcomes. While we know that it’s possible to spend too much time on investment activities like this, it is our sense that there in most organisations there is actually a bias towards spending not enough time on them. Given this, we think this is a helpful little provocation to the way people think. Of course, we know that if not enough time is spent on these investment activities, then we create crap places to work and people leave. The systemic nature of our workplaces means that it can be hard to get out of that negative cycles. In terms of how we use these, we like to share Jaime’s quote with groups in a facilitated environment and ask them what it means to them / what they take from it, then open up a conversation on the back of that. These conversations usually lead to some interesting insights and reflections.