I once had a manager who decided to put together a spreadsheet where we would track an accomplishment from the previous week and a goal for the coming week. I scoffed to myself about this. It seemed like the kind of exercise you would give a third-grade elementary school class. We were professionals, weren’t we? And weren’t we responsible and honorable enough to be relied on to be productive? What really got me was this appeared to be the manager’s own idea, rather than a corporate requirement she was compelled to follow.
Since that time, it seems that such productivity measuring devices have become the norm. It may be called different things, but there’s usually a spreadsheet to make it trackable.
The question is whether this is truly the best way to track productivity.
Utilizing Observation and Outcomes
So much of productivity relates to the work that goes into the final result. You may have only spent an hour making a sale, for instance, but the market research and the time you put into preparing your presentation may have taken hours longer. The sale is what is marked as evidence of productivity, but an effective manager would know the employee’s work well enough to know exactly what goes into each presentation regardless of the result.
Similarly, a journalist’s productivity could be marked by the number of articles they complete, but a huge part of the story—maybe even the bigger part—is the hours of work that go into collecting the material that is necessary to write the article.
Being results oriented is essential, but “productivity” can be counted as a separate measure from results. Saying a person is not productive because the outcome didn’t work out the way they expected is missing the larger picture. The employee often has acquired information during the preparation process that can be used for the next sale or assignment.
Optimizing Crystallized Knowledge and Experience
The employee diligently did research and meticulously put together a presentation. The effort was ultimately unsuccessful but calling it “unproductive” misses a chance for ongoing learning.
Learning from failure is often spoken about, so it should be common sense now to understand that “failure” following a sincere and diligent effort is a huge learning opportunity. It only serves as a chance for impactful learning, however, with the right guidance from a manager and the Learning team. Rather than let unsuccessful efforts go unmarked on the productivity spreadsheet and forgotten about, managers could meet with each employee quarterly to talk about what they consider their wins and losses over the previous four months. The employee and manager then could unpack together exactly what made some of these attempts work while others failed.
Beyond the “learning from mistakes” theme, each “failure” results in knowledge captured by the employee. They may learn about a new market to penetrate or a new way of doing an old process. The new way of doing things may not have been right in the particular way it was rolled out that time, but maybe with a few tweaks, it could be a great success next time.
Differentiating Between Sincere Effort and Wasted Time
The problem with asking employees to only mark a productivity-tracking spreadsheet with successful efforts is that it writes off all the time spent that didn’t lead to a deliverable as unproductive/unvaluable.
That means there is no differentiation between an employee who spent an afternoon shopping while on the job with an employee who spent that same afternoon putting together the sales presentation that ultimately failed. Neither afternoon resulted in a deliverable for the company, but are the efforts of equal value?
When a manager understands and appreciates an employee’s full work process—including where effort is placed regardless of outcome—long-term gains can be achieved. Lessons learned from all efforts, successful and not, are captured and employee morale continues to be stoked. After all, how frustrating is it to put hours of work into a project that is unsuccessful and be sent the message that you were as unproductive as the colleague who spent the afternoon watching TV?
Do you measure productivity in your organization? If so, what have you found is the best way to separate the productive from the unproductive?