The Semantics of Productivity
Metrics are a language, and they usually follow words used to state what someone cares about. But the trip from words to metrics is tricky, because metrics are sexy — and risky. Unless they correct the ambiguity of language that precedes them, precisely rendering ambiguous ideas probably just gives the ambiguity more opportunity to make things confusing.
Eventually, however, when measuring looks like it isn’t solving the problems given to them, someone will say “hey, maybe we’re measuring the wrong thing.” So, what is the right thing?
What Counts versus What Matters
Micromanagement has never been easier than in these days, because micro-surveillance has become the currency with which we buy (seemingly for free) socializing, apps, and even employment. Permission to be monitored turns out to not be a situation where it is easy to later Just Say No, because you either lose what you had, or it gets (in some way) a lot more expensive.
“Productivity” — a rampantly popular surveillance metric — is increasingly a label that perfumes a corrosive idea of “people as resources”; and people-centric management intentions can ironically make the situation worse instead of better because managers are looking aggressively for behavioral data that links what they call efficiency to what they call effectiveness.
When Productivity is defined as “efficient effectiveness”, it directly competes with what many are instead going to call “Performance”. Resolving the competition usually means that Productivity is dealt with as a component of Performance. Then they become synonymous, depending on who is listening; but listeners who talk a lot then propagate the supposed equivalency of the two, and voila they are pretty well mashed up and measuring them is, well, mashed up. It’s a language thing. People decide for themselves if there is a difference and what the difference ought to be if there is one.
Pushing back against all that is the perspective that productivity is a characteristic, not a result. One can still look closely for the elements of the characteristic. But yes, there should be an actual point to doing that — which is about gaining *Value*. So, as usual, I’m rejecting habitual terminology (along with a bunch of books captive to it) and instead keeping a description that I think makes more sense.
Learning from the Beautiful Game
We say “productivity” as if it is only one thing to watch, drawing it like a recipe with names and amounts for producing a dish that is a defined part of a meal or menu. But that’s because the idea seems easier to pursue as a noun than as what it really is — an adjective: Productive.
You have speed (noun), but you are fast (adjective). You have productivity, but you are productive.
When do you have productivity? You have some degree of productivity whenever something that takes effort gives more output than the input it uses.
But that sounds like efficiency. Why isn’t it the same thing? The most obvious difference is that we are usually concerned about activity limitations when we talk about productivity — whereas we are concerned about resource limitations when we talk about efficiency. But activity requires some influence of resources. To align the two, whatever makes the resource influential needs to support the influence by making it appropriate to the the purpose of the activity. If the influence is not appropriate, who cares about efficiency?
Another and even more important observation is that productivity is an effect that applies to ANY situation that can be defined as an “effort”. Pursuit of a strategy is an effort. Constructing a building is an effort. Productivity exists in terms of strategy and it also exists in terms of construction. But the terms are different.
For a moment here, I want to use a real world case to illustrate that these differences are not just meaningless abstractions or language tricks.
In organized pro league soccer, all teams play under the common rule that a Win is worth 3 points, a Draw (tie) is worth 1 point and a Loss is worth Zero points.
This is very interesting to watch in progress, because given two teams that each play three games, one team can lose two games and win one game, winding up with three points. We would say correctly that the team loses more than it wins.
Meanwhile, the other team could play to a draw each game, and wind up with 3 points. We would say, correctly, that this team never loses, but also it would be correct to say that it is “winless”.
So, in comparing the two teams, they wind up with the same ranking (by points) in the league standings; but on any given match day, one of them seems more likely to lose, and the other seems less likely to win.
After nine games, one team could have lost six times and still have the same number of points as another team that has never lost but also never won. Given that both teams have fixed resources (i.e. the same number of players and staff) and they both play by the same rules, which team would we say has been more “productive”?
The answer is that each team is productive in a certain way, but the two are not productive in the same way.
The difference between their respective perceived productivity will be attributed to a difference in the priority of whatever party measures the team’s results.
One party may place a very high premium on getting wins, while another party might place an equally high premium on avoiding losses. And beyond the nuance of language and metrics, the empirical reality is that Not Winning is entirely different from actually having Won.
With differing priorities in effect, it is clear that each team will be judged differently per priority, even if the same given party is doing all the measuring. One party, doing the measuring, can say of the team without wins: “they are productive when it comes to risk management, but not productive when it comes to advantage.”
BACK AT THE WORK SHOP
That observation is important because it relates productivity to the concept of effectiveness, requiring no reference to efficiency at all. We already know, from real life, that one can be effective without being efficient, and we know vice versa, too.
The issue being uncovered now is that we can be productive without being effective, because since effectiveness is about a given prioritized outcome, effective is NOT defined by productivity although it can be caused by productivity.
Nonetheless, in most of our talking, “effectiveness” is defined by the characteristics of a future state (outcome) that has been “produced”. Normally, there is an approach to producing the target effect — this approach is mostly referred to as a distinctive method.
“Productivity”, in comparison, is going to be about how well the logic of the method works when measured for its outputs compared to its inputs. It is actually more closely related to quality than to anything else.
Finally, in comparison to both of the above, “Efficiency” makes the most sense as a measure of how much resource is required as input for an output, regardless of whether or not the output is good at causing or predisposing the logic of the method to desirably impact the target effect.
That clarification leads to the following illustration:
One thing evident here is that there are six different things about productivity that could be evaluated subjectively, each just in terms of experienced tolerance. We could say, from experience, “too much” about this, “not enough” about that, “undesirable”, “best ever”, or whatever we were confident in saying.
But the picture argues for more. The arrangement is hierarchical, in which Resource supports Method and Method supports Objective. Meanwhile, outputs relate to outcomes whether intentionally or not. In that alignment, value is generated as outputs and outcomes relate to the main Priority served by productivity.
In the end, this all means that productivity measures are unimportant outside of the context declared by the Priority.
Unfortunately, according to the press right now, there is an epidemic of employees being subjected to unimportant productivity metrics. As difficult as it may be for executives and managers to justify their forecasts to those who pay them, the other workers who do most of the day to day “operating” should expect to be compensated for value created, not for compliance to utilization requirements.
There is an important (and perhaps critically so) change of perspective to apply as a replacement of productivity — namely, co-operation. Employee commitment to working together for each other should never be subordinated to formulas for individual compliance, but this subordination is an increasing problem for workers who are remote, who rely on creativity for their impact, and for a broad swath of those called “knowledge workers” tackling complexity with a multi-method skill set. Executives should ask managers to design the work such that co-operation is what workers sign up for with each other.
