From the workplace productivity shadow
Pennies drop in all sizes. Miniature ones, like tears in a lake. Enormous ones, like meteors on an unsuspecting desert. Of all those that fell during the Covid-19 pandemic, however, one tumbled to earth like a marshmallow. We heard nothing, too engrossed were we in the productivity miracle of those emptied from their offices into confined domesticity.
Workplace strategists have for decades been grappling with how to extricate the contribution to productivity of an improved physical working environment in order to justify the investment in its creation. And, naturally, our involvement. Strangely, however, the fixation on productivity has rarely stepped over into the carpeted hallways of the corporate world. There have always been other justifications for the intervention. It’s been an almost exclusively insular, industry obsession.
Yet during multiple lockdowns, the productivity boom was discernible both subjectively and objectively, perhaps for many for the first time. We felt productive, we were getting through stuff, we up-cycled our commute into untrammelled achievement, we committed where once we would have merely presented. Which is why every time we were asked — and we were asked by just about everyone with a question mark — we said exactly that. Even making our own cheese sandwiches was quicker than being relieved of a tenner at the local Pret or near-Pret equivalent. And so much more cheese.
We were actually productive, too. Strangely, organisations found themselves able to measure productivity where for years this seemed to be a mystery. The output meter quivered into the red zone, mission control watched all that stuff get done, and loved it. They marvelled at how the discretionary became routine, proof of output replacing evidence of attendance. All driven by digital transformation that was mainly just catching up, a great home working experiment that was compulsory and so wasn’t, and unprecedented change that was for the most part pure, static tedium. But bloody hell, we knocked it out of the park and felt it go. The sum total, a resounding affirmation of the new way of working life. Who other than the bed-enders would want to return to the old ways?
The prevailing, dominant concept of the workplace in the decades leading up to Covid was, for most large organisations, amenity and service-rich environments with a wide variety of shared work settings that tried to do everything for everyone across both time and function, consolidated into urban transport hubs in order to get as many people there as possible and draw on the widest talent pool available. No surprise, as they were the principal place of work for most. In a world based on attendance, it made sense. They were referred to as ‘agile’ or ‘activity based’, while being neither. Half empty at any time of the week, they were three quarters empty on Friday. The waste was accepted as ‘the way of things’, a product of the natural ebb and flow of white collar life.
Yet the problem was, in trying to do everything for everyone, it was impossible beyond an individually-focussed point-in-time survey to determine how successful the workplace was at any form of contribution in particular. We knew that we had excellent workplaces, average workplaces and — whisper it — crap workplaces. And we knew what people liked and didn’t like about them, often in great detail. We all hated the filament lightbulbs, naturally. But we didn’t know much more.
The upshot being that now we are pondering whether the steel and glass Gormenghast has anything left to offer, we’re not entirely sure what value it delivered last time around. The evidence is anecdotal, personal and emotional. It relates mostly to the feeling of being human — interaction, nuance, the complex signals of face to face communication, the slow, clumsy and chaotic emergence of new relationships.
In being sure that our productivity actually increased — and felt like it increased — working at home, we’ve drawn the conclusion that all the damn thing did was prevent us from working: the insanity of the time, cost and risk of the commute (even though we choose where we live in relation to our work), the disturbance from output-crunching colleagues, scattered amid layouts devoid of humanity. It’s a hugely dangerous conclusion to draw.
That’s because productivity is what we do today. The purpose — and its enabling methods, processes, people and technology — were determined previously. Yesterday’s innovation. We bloody well should be good at it, as we know what we need to do, how to do it and who we need to do it with, and practice it daily. We operate under the illusion that greater productivity creates free time for thought and leisure, but we invariably fill it with more output.
Innovation is the ticket to tomorrow. The reason our organisation survives and thrives. We didn’t know how it happened pre-pandemic because it emerged in so many different ways. We didn’t know how to model or replicate it. We were never entirely sure where innovation happened because it took a mazy, iterative path from interest and motivation, to the building of trust over time with those with whom we weren’t told to work, to freely determined collaboration.
Which means during the pandemic many organisations won’t be sure what they’ve lost, what hasn’t happened, because it didn’t appear on a to-do list or in a schedule or programme, or wasn’t a project. We’ve heard from devotees of remote work that innovation is quite possible without face to face interaction. That is distinctly possible, and this post is not a denial of this assertion. But for many they won’t yet know. The innovation lag killed off many companies in the last few decades who thought they were doing just fine, who believed that their environment wouldn’t change. And that was in open play, without a pandemic.
All those spaces we built at the office for ‘collaboration’ were in fact for co-ordination and co-operation, productivity-oriented tasks where we knew we had to do something and were operating under compulsion. The trend of late to take the pre-pandemic model and dial up those settings deemed secondary at the expense of the primary (desks) may find their environment sparsely populated and the outcome not quite as expected. We don’t collaborate on demand, we explore from proximity.
The split of roughly half of each was probably right even for today, as our work is still a balance between what we do alone or together, wherever we do it. The opportunity to drive greater utilisation or reduce space comes from using technology to schedule reduced attendance across the full week, so that what we have is full and alive. Less space, but still balanced.
If Covid has done one thing for office, therefore, it’s severed the obsessive association with productivity. It may take some time to trickle through. We’ve proven we can be productive in and out of the office, essentially almost anywhere. The struggle over the embers of where is most productive, home or office, will inevitably rage for some time, but it’s simply a distraction.
What we haven’t yet proven is that we can innovate without the office and our presence within it. As organisations move into a hybrid mode, they’ll need to develop a far deeper understanding of how it happens, rather than relying on chance or believing that because it always did, it always will. That’s an off-peak single to extinction.
Productivity is getting stuff done today. Sooner or later it runs out. Innovation is the possibility that there will be stuff to do tomorrow. Beyond everything else, that’s why we’ll show up.
