Have you been a victim of productivity theater?
Melina Moleskis, PhD MBA wrote a great piece for the The Decision Lab on this.
Some points I liked:
1. In the past, measuring productivity was simpler because work was predictable and involved low variability, such as the assembly line production where the number of items produced could be tracked.
2. In today's knowledge-based job environment, productivity is more difficult to measure because it is neither visible nor predictable.
3. To counter this, companies have started using 'utilization' as a productivity measure - essentially how many hours are worked, as opposed to the value of work produced.
4. This has led to the phenomenon of 'productivity theater' or 'facetime culture', where employees engage in behaviors that only give the appearance of working hard, such as staying late or scheduling numerous meetings to look busy.
5. The consequence of this is that employees are wasting time and energy on maintaining the appearance of productivity, leaving less time for actual work and personal life.
5. This system rewards the appearance of busyness over actual productivity, causing employees to adjust their behavior to meet this expectation and, paradoxically, often leading to a decrease in actual productivity.
In behavioral terms, we can think of incentives and metrics as a lever for change, it can either enable behavior or hinder it.
We have to be careful of what we design as an incentive in an organisation, as the wrong incentives being rewarded can lead to this productivity theatre and the wrong organisational culture.
That’s why when I work with organisations, I always ask about incentives and rewards - the formal ones, but alao the informal ones, to see how we can influence on them to enable behavior.
Let me know in the comments if you want to read the whole article, so I can post a link - it is well worth it 😊