Productivity vs Quality of Life
One Sunday back in August, for reasons I have since forgotten, I wrote down the three questions laid out below. I didn’t have any answers at the time, but I suppose I felt they were worthy of thinking about; and more importantly, I thought they were worth voicing publicly along with my answers — also laid out below.
The gist of these questions is rooted in what we are trying to achieve in our efforts to drive digital transformation, improved collaboration capabilities, and better digital workplaces. The conversation revolves around the ethics of our intentions.
What if productivity gains weren’t the end goal?
I’ve voiced this before: the end goal of engagement is to increase discretionary effort. Effort is a driver of productivity. The harder we try; the more we produce. Discretionary is optional. We don’t have to do it. No one is forcing us to go the extra mile, but we do it any way. Discretionary is free. The rationale then goes that the more engaged an employee is the more discretionary effort they will give.
So, we strive to create services, tools, and experiences that are engaging. This inherently is a productivity-based goal. We see this in consumer applications and services all the time. They are designed to reward and entice…to keep users in and coming back for more. Why? To increase usage. The more we use the more ads that we’ll see, the more data we’ll provide, or the more add-ons will purchase.
We do the same thing with corporate applications and services. We build in gamification to entice and reward. We make interfaces appealing (no more green screens!) and interactions delightful.
Addiction is the new adoption.
But, what if we weren’t shooting for productivity?
What if improving quality of life was the real goal?
Well foremost, this would be an admirable goal. It would signify that we cared for the well-being of our users. That we weren’t just in it to for our own intentions, primarily driven by getting the most out of our workforce and employees. It would guide our designs not toward addictive interactions but instead to simplicity and utility.
What is functional and simple should also be effective and efficient. Therefore, functional and simple is also productive. And at the same time can contribute to a higher quality of life by the very same characteristics since a higher quality of life in a work context is that we enable employees to do their jobs in the easiest and friction-free manner as possible. Make my job easier to do and you raise my quality of life. It is that simple.
Applications and services designed for quality of life should result then from human centered design approaches.
Right?
Have we been achieving this?
Maybe sometimes. Maybe intentionally, but too often only accidently or as some biproduct of blindly chasing UI and UX trends. Much of the design work is out of our hands in today’s SaaS world. We are now at the mercy of the designs and priorities of the product owners employed by the companies we choose to buy services from. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Most cloud service-oriented applications provide ample opportunity for customers to give feedback and drive roadmaps of future enhancements. They also inherently need to appeal to broad audiences, so functional and simple goals should see a prevailing demand.
We might ask whether or not we can do both: strive for productivity AND quality of life. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with wanting both. We are presumably in for-profit business ventures after all. So, productivity is often the goal, and I am not trying to advocate that it is necessarily a “bad” goal to have.
The key is what we set as our primary goal. Aligning with improving quality of life, in my opinion, is a more noble and altruistic aim. To get there, we need to expand our empathy for our workforces and imbue our products and services not with frivolous hooks disguised as features but with intuitive, useful, and simple mechanisms that help them quickly accomplish their objectives.
With this, perhaps we can create experiences that don’t just momentarily delight but instead provide lasting meaning.
Is this just Design Thinking and Human Centered Design principles applied to our digital transformation and digital workplace efforts? Not really. I think it is that but more. It is really looking at the good we are doing, or attempting to do, and how that manifests within the digital solutions we implement and promote within our organizations.
To read more on this philosophy, start with Kate O’Neill’s Tech Humanist Manifesto or advance to her new book Tech Humanist: How You Can Make Technology Better for Business and Better for Humans.
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