By John Blackwell
Edition 5 – May 2015 Pages 18-21
Tags: workplace strategy • technology
Productivity is at the heart of all businesses and is essential for corporate growth.When it comes to increasing output at an organisation,which in turn then directly relates to wider real wage growth and higher living standards in the economy,then the only determinant is productivity,measured in terms of output per hour worked.
The basic facts on productivity are clear.For over a decade, productivity has been painfully weak across all the major economies – UK,US,EU,Japan,G7. The UK is just one of the world’s major economies that has performed particularly badly,with actual productivity having declined by 3.7% since 2008 alone. A recent OECD report went as far as saying,“… Weak labour productivity since 2004 has been holding back real wages and well-being. The sustainability of economic expansion and further progress in living standards rest on boosting productivity growth,which is a key challenge for the coming years…”1
Yet all of this is in the face of a decade-long onslaught of new ‘productivity’ interventions from a range of directions. So,all of this begs the rather obvious question, of what’s really happening to all these fantastic productivity initiatives? Recent research has highlighted that business leaders have lost patience with this situation and are taking direct action.
This article explores the background to this unsustainable situation,what actions organisations are currently taking,and what outcomes can be anticipated?
An age of speed
Our age of speed and overload has been building for generations. Inventions such as the telegraph,cinema, railroad,and airplane have progressively reduced distance and upended our traditional temporal rhythms.
However,the first high-tech revolutions that began to shift our experiences of time and space more than a century ago have substantially intensified over the course of the last ten years.
Unlike any time in past hundred years, the last decade has seen a veritable avalanche of new ‘things’ that have accelerated our hypermobile, split-focus, cyber-centric culture.
The result of this excess of interventions is to have left the workforce continually distracted by new facilities, tools, and policies to collaborate, communicate, and connect but all too frequently without the required forethought to ensure these interventions work in unison and with context.
For example, our colleagues in the elds of architecture and design have relentlessly bombarded our workforces with a decade-long campaign of open plan officing,hotelling,hot desking, collaboration space, ‘communicate-collaborate- concentrate-contemplate’ spaces, ‘activity based working’, ‘spatial adjacency’ and a number of other new ideas and variations on themes.Someone even thought it was a good idea to incorporate ski gondolas in an office design.
Our IT colleagues have
driven us from desktops to virtualisation, laptops to tablets. We have gone from cellular to smartphones, from internet to ‘i’ everything, from GUI to cloud, USB to uni ed communications, with each iteration promising great productive gains. We have gone from megabyte to petabyte all because big data is good data.
And our Human Resources colleagues have taken their workforces on a journey from personnel administration
to emotional capital, from job satisfaction to employee engagement, from employment to empowerment, from training to ‘integrated capability development’, from hiring to talent analytics, from career to core competencies. We have experienced a decade of telecommuting to exible working to agile working.
Without exception, all of these interventions have entered into our workplaces with the promise of untold productivity gains. Yet, the absence of clear ‘what’s in it for me’ messaging, and frequent lack of cohesion between the various delivery functions have only succeeded in confusing and distracting the workforce.
Interrupting science
While there’s always a number of excuses put forward to explain this dwindling productivity, everything points to one overriding factor that stands out head-and-shoulders above all others, namely ‘interruption science’.
We prize knowledge work – work that relies on our intellectual abilities – and yet the evidence is that we increasingly have no time to think.
The greatest casualty of our mobile, high- tech,over-burdened age is attention – and by implication,productivity. By fragmenting
and di using our powers of attention,we are undermining our capacity to thrive in a complex, ever-shifting world….