Part 1:
Although many managers throughout history have tried to get their employees to work harder and produce more for less, it was not until 1911, when Fredrick W. Taylor published his book “The principles of scientific management”, that managers were presented with a systematic way of optimising production to deliver higher outputs.
Ever since then many managers have been trying to count widgets per hour or outputs divided by input, even though many of our jobs have moved on from being a single, simple standardised process.
There are of course some jobs that are routine, transactional and reactive and so will still lend themselves to be measured in more traditional ways. Jobs that have more complex, proactive and collaborative workstreams, however are far more difficult to measure. Cal Newport in his book “Deep work”, a fascinating read, called the problem “the metric black hole”.
Fredrick Taylor and many after him, wanted to standardise everything to ensure maximum efficiency. The term one size fits all has for many years been the battle cry used by these managers. In modern business, not all jobs are the same and so one size or measurement system cannot be applied to all jobs. The old measures no longer seem relevant.
Even so with knowledge workers now making up almost half of the USA’s workforce, and most probably the UK’s as well, we still find Fred’s principals alive and well in many modern management practises. But what about quality? In this day and age, it’s as important if not more important than quantity. We also no longer carry out just one task; knowledge work requires us to carry out multiple tasks in order to do our jobs.
In the past, the standardisation of jobs have had a detrimental effect on the motivation of employees. It was almost as if businesses were trying to turn humans into machines. I could believe this 100 years ago, but surely not now.
Statistics from a number of studies unfortunately tell a different story, showing that a significant percentage of staff in the UK are not motivated at work. A recent survey conducted by Scottish based Eden Springs uncovered some worrying statistics.
- In a survey of 500 UK office workers by Bupa, when asked to rate on a scale of 1-10 how motivated and energised they felt during the working week, 48% of respondents rated their energy and motivation below five.
- Over half of UK employees admitted to not going above and beyond at work because they think that they won’t be acknowledged (46%) or rewarded (47%).
- Less than one in ten (7%) employees say they are working to their full potential.
Given the lack of motivation within the UK workforce it does not bear well for the productivity of our businesses.
Cal Newport’s book “Deep work” concludes that deep focused work is becoming a lost art as many knowledge workers are being driven down the route of serendipitous collaboration, a connected and always available culture, as well as the continuous lure of social media. Deep work is an integral part of knowledge work and our inability to concentrate fully in this digitally remastered world must have a detrimental effect on our productivity.
To add more complexity to the issue, many jobs are now more collaborative and team based in nature and so is measuring one person’s productivity still relevant when success often depends on the whole team’s effort? In a team environment, team performance measures must be more relevant.
One thing still remains and that is however hard it is to reliably measure individual or team output it is still key to a business’s future health.
So, what’s the answer? In part 2 I will put forward a few thoughts, ideas and a process as to how we might start to measure productivity (sorry I hate the word and will now start to use the word “performance” in future. There needs to be more open discussions on the subject with lots of thoughts and ideas being brought to the table.
In the meantime, I would like you to consider some additional research on the subject.
Kim Cameron and his colleagues at the University of Michigan, carried out research and discovered that a workplace characterised by “positive and virtuous practices” achieved significantly higher levels of organisational effectiveness including financial performance, customer satisfaction and productivity, however I could not find out the key measures they used to measure productivity!
A Stanford study proclaims that “Collaboration drives performance”. Just the fact of belonging to a team made people more motivated. Collaborative teams stuck to their tasks 64% longer than their solitary peers along with higher engagement levels and lower fatigue levels. It was found that the key to productive collaboration was purpose.
A similar finding came out of a recent study between the Institute for Corporate Productivity and Rob Cross, Edward A. Madden, Professor of Global Business at Babson College. The study found that companies that promote collaborative working were 5 times as likely to be high preforming.
The study examined over 1,100 companies, many of whom claim to have open and collaborative cultures. Whilst many aspired to be collaborative however, a relative minority managed to achieve good results, with the authors suggesting that the key to productive collaboration was purpose.
So, some things to think about. I will be posting part 2 next week. Before that, however I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on what is a complex and intriguing topic.