Simplifying and Mythbusting Employee Productivity
Everything leaders know about productivity is typically learned from books about business, business school, and anecdotal information. In some cases, they’ve been lucky enough to have real-world experience which taught them good lessons about productivity in the workplace. This type of learning can lead to some outdated and inaccurate ideas about productivity.
Understanding productivity as a concept falls more into the realm of psychology than it does business. Individual, team, and company productivity are heavily influenced by human behavioral traits. Psychology Today states that productivity draws on mental energy, physical energy, and motivation from “meaningful” work to be successful.
Efforts to increase productivity usually focus on motivating the employee by giving them meaningful work. The individual is responsible for their physical condition, and the company may assist with mental health support. It may be time to reframe those assumptions to give more weight to the mental part - the psychology of the individual - and bust common business myths about increasing productivity.
Once you start viewing it through a psychological lens, the idea of productivity becomes a bit less complex. Everyday business operations and disrupting events such as the pandemic or AI influence productivity, but the mechanics of productivity itself are psychological in nature.
Myths About Employee Productivity Busted by JotForm CEO
The CEO of Jotform, Aytekin Tank, wrote an article in Entrepreneur magazine* in which he busts some myths about productivity with hard data. Many of them are rooted in misunderstanding what productivity is. He states that he wants to “build a culture where people can do their best work without burning out.” He effectively busts the myths that productivity is a KPI to be hacked, a high workload hampers health, and, therefore productivity, and more.
Work has always been viewed as a grind, and it is only in modern times where we have tried to make it enjoyable in order to keep workers engaged and highly productive. Tank suggests that companies do whatever they can to make work meaningful with training, compensation, and any other means available.
He also suggests automating “busy work” such as scheduling meetings, sending basic emails, and so on to make more time for work that is considered to be more productive and meaningful. He has put various measures in place at JotForm to automate tasks that can be automated.
Tank addresses factors that could influence physical and mental energy by suggesting additional time off for employees, flex time, and similar measures that aren’t a four-day work week. While this work style has been highly successful where it has been implemented, it just isn’t practical for most companies to adopt . Stakeholders, clients, and customers will inevitably want things on an employee’s day off, and if they don’t get what they want on a consistent basis, there’s a good chance they’ll go somewhere else.
An Increased Workload Doesn’t Lead To Burnout If The Psychology Is Right
The most intriguing thing that Tank considers to be a myth about productivity is that an increased workload leads to burnout, and this is where we really get into the psychology behind productivity. While he acknowledges that it is true that a sustained high workload can lead to burnout, and should be discouraged, he argues that if the work is considered meaningful for the employee it is less likely to affect their health.
According to the data, if the long hours are due to external factors such as peer pressure or guilt, long work hours will affect an employee’s health. If the long hours are self-motivated by internal factors such as the desire to succeed, health is unaffected. This makes sense - how many times have you spent way too much time on a passion project and didn’t notice the hours flying by?
The key for management is to identify what qualifies as a passion project for their team members, and assign them those tasks as much as possible. For example, if a member of your team really loves building reports, have them focus on those and shift other responsibilities elsewhere.
To be productive, your people need to feel good mentally, both from a motivational and a mental health standpoint. While you can’t be too invasive about what is going on in a staff member’s life, you can make sure they are offered the right mental health support, flex time, and time off to rest and recharge. Retention is also higher when people believe they are with a company that cares about their wellbeing.
If you want to increase productivity, you’re going to have to be able to measure it first. You can do that with Prodoscore, our employee productivity monitoring solution that provides actionable insight into daily contributions. The data encourages self-coaching as well as objectivity that drives smarter decision making and success.
*Please note that the linked article requires a subscription to Entrepreneur. Apple News+ subscribers will be able to find it in the app by searching for the article title, available at the link.
