How to Redefine Work Productivity
Many efforts to be more productive
As our need for more collaborative and frictionless experiences extends into the workplace, new production methodologies continued to emerge, offering speedier processes and more streamlined workflows. Gartner had well summarized all these methodologies and suggested how to best converge them all in the image below — Design Thinking to explore the problem, Lean Startup to build the right thing, and Agile to build the thing right.
Whichever methodology you rely on, or whatever stage your company may be in, your team productivity should be measured with the right metrics — they need to be expectable and non-conditional to resource limitations or life cycle of a project. Without such metrics, it is merely impossible to make any sound decisions on whether to take on daring risk to catch oncoming opportunities or to extend your runway more conservatively waiting for the next one. Now the question is, what do I mean by the right metrics?
The Classic Definition of Productivity
It was long believed that productivity is to be calculated simply by dividing the outputs produced by the inputs. However, this fails to take into account factors that are beyond tangible outcomes, such as the level of active engagement. Rather, productivity is often overly simplified as being inversely proportional — being unproductive when less output is produced without decreasing the input or the same output is produced with more input.
This conventional way of measuring productivity fails to recognize that quality is just as important (or sometimes even more important) as quantity. What is being “produced” by a knowledge worker? How valuable is that output? Does time even matter? If so, when? Without answers to these questions, one is left with the impression that productivity is no more than a simplistic equation — a=b÷c.
In short, this formularized approach that simply defaults to quantitative metrics makes little sense to modern teams whose performance reaches beyond quantifiable outputs. For instance, assessing the performance of software engineers by “the number of lines of code written in a specific time” completely ignores the factors like code quality or work efficiency. What if another developer writes half the code lines with the performance during the same or less time? In other words, the conventional way of measuring productivity is applying stakes that are ignorant of the complexity in today’s various work positions, especially in the knowledge industry.
A More Comprehensive way to Measure Productivity
When calculating productivity more comprehensively, one should never put aside the engagement-related factors, such as the number of messages exchanged or the total amount of time spent on a project. These values enable us to assess the difficulty of work… Let me try to explain visually (refer to the image below). I’d view the bottom right section of the chart as least productive among all four sections with the lowest number of tasks in the section performing (output) lowest in spite of the highest level of engagement (input). But the truth is that the tasks in this particular section should be considered the hardest in task difficulty compared to the rest, requiring more time and some level of expertise. In collaborative environments, there are a lot more variables that affect how to interpret the assessment of one’s productivity such as priorities, work dependencies between tasks, or contribution rates among assignees.
How to monitor your productivity tools
You can also apply such a comprehensive productivity measurement to your productivity tools. If you’re using a team chat and a project management tool, your team’s productivity could be measured by dividing the number of Done Tasks (quantity of output) combined with the level of difficulty by the number of messages and the amount of time spent. If you can get more work done in the task management tool in relatively less time with fewer messages, we can call it more productive.
This new formula tells us that communication seems like a good thing for work collaboration until you have too much of it. Because it’s so easy to talk to our colleagues using a team chat like Slack, many of us are typing meaningless things away without getting any actual work done. Simply lowering the barrier to exchange communication has resulted in much bulkier, lower quality communication. In fact, Slack cleared up the communication blockage letting in more messages than we’ve ever received before. Whether we realized it or not, keeping up with these conversations had become a full-time job. If the total amount of time we spend communicating hasn’t actually lessened after adopting a team chat, how could we say that work became more productive?
Diminishing Returns of Productivity Tools
I’m not saying we should comprehensively halt the use of team chat. I’m saying, we should know where to draw the line with the chat tool before our productivity suffers the diminishing returns. Using a team chat like Slack as the sole collaboration source could give your colleagues a false idea that they’re working hard when no tasks are actually getting done because all you can do on Slack is talking. One should understand that messaging colleagues, reacting with emojis, or posting information is no more than putting on a facade that people are doing work.
Because chat isn’t sufficient to measure productivity, 91% of companies adopt more than one collaboration tool — mostly a project management tool to fill in what chat tools lack — tracking issues, assigning tasks, and managing due dates. This is how your messenger-centric work habit is formed. Businesses would integrate more and more tools to overcome these challenges, though this integration distracts you with more notifications and unpleasant app switching experiences with stuff everywhere and unsearchable context.
It is way easier to fall into the trap of getting instant reactions and sending as many messages as you want than creating fewer messages with actionable work plans. This is why people prefer using a messenger tool to other integrated work management tools. I strongly recommend you should read these articles:
These articles address the same problems of messenger-centric workflows. In summary, they argue;
- Easy to message, but difficult to manage
- Hell of Notifications
- Too many channels for data location
- Inevitable need for integrating Tasks;
For instance, it’s been a year-and-a-half since Slack and Atlassian announced its partnership in July 2018. This was more than enough to tell the world that coupling chat and tasks are where the future lies. What has changed since then? Nothing. These two giants would never fully emerge as one while Swit is now the new cool kid on the block leading his pack.
- But, switching apps is bad
40% decreased productivity
It takes 23 min to re-focus
- Large teams are left out
[How to Talk Less and Do More]
I can’t agree more with the problems addressed in these articles above. What I find disappointing is that they don’t propose a sound solution for these issues. Still on a hunt for the solution, the authors claim, “if we could find a big umbrella to have the two functions — chat & task — in one platform that helps us form a better Task-centric Collaboration Workflow, it would be great.”
I’m happy to announce that we have that dream tool, designed not to make you use our tool more, but less (less time and notifications) for much more quality communication.
All features are available in every tier from Free to Advanced Plus on Swit.
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