The productivity lie
Early in my career managing teams, I was laser-focused on all the wrong metrics for productivity. Did everyone clock in on time? How many hours were they sitting at their desks? Who was burning the midnight oil? I conflated physical presence with output, developing unhealthy obsessions over monitoring workers’ comings and goings.
It wasn’t until I took over a geographically dispersed team spread across the country that I finally shed those ingrained biases about what real productivity looks like. With some employees working from home and others in different offices, I quickly realized that clocking face time was an imperfect and discriminatory way to measure performance.
Instead, I was forced to look at actual deliverables, work quality, and results achieved regardless of the physical workplace. That’s when everything clicked – where someone churned out their work ultimately didn’t matter. It was the output itself that counted.
The corporate world is still stuck in these outdated notions that employees can only be productive under direct supervision within an office environment. A recent HR Executive article highlights how many companies, after briefly experiencing success with remote arrangements, are doubling down on stringent return-to-office mandates with hopes of boosting sagging productivity. In reality, they’re just eroding trust while subjecting their workforce to policies out of step with modern professional realities. As the piece outlines, organizations that cultivate cultures of mutual trust and empowerment see substantial productivity gains. While those still clinging to rigid, location-centric ways are floundering.
For me, managing that dispersed team was an education in finally moving beyond merely counting hours and output. It was about extending autonomy and trust to professional adults to get work done based on their own schedules and productivity styles. Some of my top performers were early-morning warriors. Others were night owls. Forcing them into arbitrary office schedules would have been demotivating.
Workplaces trying to enforce productivity strictly through office presenteeism are going to struggle to retain top talent in this new world of work. The most innovative companies will treat employees like the intellectual knowledge workers they are – free to work whenever and wherever helps them achieve optimal results. That’s not to say offices or co-located work isn’t valuable. There’s certainly a place for in-person collaboration, building camaraderie, and fostering creativity. But those decisions should be made strategically and thoughtfully, not through top-down blanket mandates.
For leaders, it means developing new skills around managing a results-only work environment based on mutual trust with employees. Explore how you can move beyond counting hours toward empowering your people to get work done in a way that inspires their peak productivity. Because, as I had to learn the hard way, that’s the only metric that truly matters.