Your productivity doesn’t matter, but your impact does!
Whenever the benefits and drawbacks of different working practices are discussed, conversations will commonly include references back to productivity. For example, “if we do X then I can be more productive” or “if we avoid Y we can get more done as a team”. In such conversations X and Y might be referring to novel office perks, using a new technology, having fewer video calls, a different organisational structure or any number of other things. Productivity can be measured by how efficiently you, or a small group of people, can complete tasks. The more tasks completed in the same amount of time, the higher your productivity.
Figure 1 shows four hypothetical processes, P1, P2, P3 and P4, related to remote working. Of these four different processes, P4 has the highest productivity.
It’s understandable that many process discussions tend to focus on productivity. As a metric it is personal, visible, easy to grasp, and contains few unknowns. However, you don’t have to look far to find frustration and misunderstanding in these kinds of discussions. Perhaps you’ve experienced this yourself. So where might things be getting lost in translation?
The big problem with such discussions is that they are focussing on the wrong success metric, as far as businesses are concerned. It’s possible to be very productive and still deliver no relevant business impact. Impact is the ability to have a measurable effect and deliver value to a team and or your customers, either directly or indirectly. If you are in sales then your new revenue generated is effectively synonymous with your impact. How many emails or calls you made to deliver that revenue is far less relevant. So your impact can also be described as ‘what’ you deliver rather than how efficiently you deliver it. Sometimes, frustratingly, the simplest, dirtiest and quickest things deliver the greatest impact.
If you work in tech, impact is not just a personal thing and it’s far from simple. In such collaborative environments your impact influences and is influenced by those around you, much more so than productivity might be. Due to this cumulative and circular relationship impact is much more opaque, hard to get feedback on and has much less of an intuitive quality. Something you do today may also take several months to deliver its impact.
Although in a simple case it’s reasonable to assume impact is proportional to productivity, this is all too often not the case. If we expand our perspective of figure 1, to include the associated impact of the processes, we come to a very different conclusion than before. Productivity has remained unchanged but P2 is now the better process regarding impact delivery.
As an example, if we consider remote working practices again, what kind of differences might have made scenario P2 and P3 less productive, yet more impactful than P4? Perhaps there were more video calls and meetings, more back and forths, more double checking, a couple of strategic shortcuts, less re-work, more data analysis, more pair programming, more breaks to sit back and see the bigger picture, a chance encounter that resulted in a suitable corner being cut, more time spent chasing customers for feedback and so on.
Consider also a team scenario where you’re the lead. If you are less productive in order to benefit the team, and then in return the team as a whole contributes more, you’ve delivered a higher impact. This is particularly important to leaders who should intentionally be trading-off some personal productivity in return for their team and company delivering more.
A team member may also influence the productivity of their team in numerous ways, for example by improving another’s motivation and feelings of well being. This would be a good example of an indirect impact. Opportunities to recognise these kinds of situations may be maximised when physically being with someone. For example hearing that they sigh a lot or are regularly slumped in their chair when not in meetings. This is an argument for why, while a fully remote team member may be able to match productivity like for like with peers, there may remain a gap in their impact in comparison with a hybrid team member. This is a gap left by serendipitous encounters and discoveries that can be maximised when meeting in person (https://ebx.sh/VZJWui).
So next time you avoid a distraction with a view to being more productive, I would ask you to consider if this might in fact be lowering your impact.
This raises an obvious follow-on question of how we might know where on the impact spectrum our processes might fall. We shared our thoughts on this in our follow on blog here.
