Nigel Cassidy (NC): It's the workplace puzzle. Why is productivity flatlining while technology is ever advancing? What can be done to help people to be more productive? I'm Nigel Cassidy and this is the CIPD podcast.
Now several studies have shown that workers are only productive for an average of, wait for it, 2 hours 53 minutes per day. Measured in employee output per hour, little has changed since 2010. It's hard to credit seeing how digital innovation and AI have transformed how we all work. The result? Poor competitiveness, stagnant profitability and growth, and forecasts to stay that way for years more. Instinctively, we feel it must have something to do with what everyone does or doesn't do all day at their desks or wherever they work. So what can HR do to spot the causes of poor productivity and then help us better motivate individuals and recognise their efforts? Just how do you cut through all that daily busyness to get more output?
Well, joining me for our final CIPD podcast of this year, Sharon Benson, who comes with a strong reputation for commercially focused HR leadership. Her senior roles have included a spell as organisational efficiency director at Boots. She's founding director of consultancy Colleague Central. Hi, Sharon.
Sharon Benson (SB): Hi, Nigel.
NC: Lu McKay has a particular understanding of the cultures and practices that can stifle productivity. After years of experience in-house and consulting, she's now a leadership coach and the founder at the communications company Luminary. Hi, Lu.
Lu McKay: Hi there, Nigel. Nice to hear you.
NC: And with a wider view on all this, someone who's long measured, analysed and compared global productivity. For years as a former chief economist at the respected Conference Board in New York, now Director at the Productivity Institute and Principal Investigator and Professor of Productivity Studies at the University of Manchester Business School. It's Bart van Ark.
Bart van Ark (BvA): Hello, Nigel. Thanks for having me on.
NC: Now, just before we get stuck in, always good to start a bit left field. I just wondered if any of you can bring to mind your least most productive day or time. I mean, what was it like and what did you do to ensure it wasn't repeated or at least that you learned something from it?
SB: I feel I have too many of those actually to be fair Nigel. I think one of those days is where you plan, you have this brilliant plan of all these activities. As an achievement driven person, I'd have my task list. However, the life of a HR professional, sometimes you are not the master of your own destiny every day. So an unproductive day for me is where everybody else has hoovered up your time and actually you put them before your own workload.
NC: Lu, does that resonate with you?
LM: Yeah, actually, I was going to share a bit of a learning moment and take you way back. I was 14 going on 15 and I'd landed myself a week's work experience at a local radio station. Bit of context, school wasn't really my jam, so actually being in the workplace was so exciting. I've been working through my list of tasks. I had really got in. I have to be professional, I have to get things done. So I'd made sure I got the lunch order done by 10 o'clock because that was the deadline. I'd brought the deliveries in. I'd made sure that the studio had their events information by 11 because there was another deadline. And my supervisor came to check on me just before lunch asking how things have gone. And I was really pleased with my list. And she said, what about these two things? And those two things were an email to a couple of colleagues. She said, why haven't you done that? I said, oh, well, I had the deadlines. She said, yeah, but you need them to do something for you and you've just robbed them of three hours to do it. And there was an absolute learning moment of going, oh, okay, if you need someone to do something for you, give them the best possible opportunity. So that has stayed with me forever.
NC: Okay, what about you, Professor?
BvA: Well it all resonates, of course, what's being said here by Sharon and Lu. Yeah, unproductive days are days that you are firefighting. And yes, Sharon said you are helping other people, but at the end of the day, you think, what have I got done?
Now, of course, I agree that having a plan for what you want to do during the day is incredibly helpful to be productive at the end of the day. But I've also found, particularly since COVID, when we do more remote work, that when I'm in the office, I spent a lot of time with people at the so-called water cooler, the coffee machine, and they may not be felt as being productive times, but then I go home and then I think that was actually incredibly productive time. So I actually did figure that, if you have too much of a plan during the day and you don't have enough room in your schedule to talk to your colleagues and to your staff, you're actually losing a lot of productivity as well.
NC: Some interesting findings from the CIPD on that. Two-fifths surveyed believed that an increase in home working led to more productivity and efficiency. Only 16% thought it had gone down. However, several studies found that fully remote working yields lower productivity…
SB: Yeah.
BvA: Yeah.
NC: …but we might get into a bit more of that later. But Bart, let me just stick with you for a moment. I was rather shocked to find there are so many definitions of productivity. I got a bit confused. I mean, I was just sticking to the sort of whatever I learned at school. You know, it's a measure of economic performance, comparing the output of goods and services with the inputs used to produce them. I think we all kind of got that. So in terms of organisations, what is productivity for you in a nutshell and why is it important for organisations to tackle?
BvA: Yeah, it's a great question. And frankly, it's a question that of all those years I worked on productivity, it's the first question you always get, what is it? And obviously everybody has their own personal definition, you know, as we just discussed what is a productive day for ourselves. But broadening the picture a little bit, there's of course a sort of economic definition. That's the definition you hear the government talk about, you read in the newspaper, you hear the Office for National Statistics talk about. That's a measure of the total output to total GDP across domestic product we produce as a nation. Quite often divided by the number of hours worked that we're putting into it. So that's the sort of output per hour worked. I mean, there are more complex definitions like that, that I don't want to go into right now.
Now, frankly, when you talk to companies, most of the time, I don't find that companies are attuning very well with that term that say, well, we don't measure GDP in that way in our own company. And by the way, yes, our people are really, really important, but there's a lot more that we're using in terms of resources that helps us to understand whether people are more or less productive. So I always say to firms, you know, I don't want to impose any definition on you. You have to think about what is workable for you. Productivity is always is something above the line and below the line. So above the line is what is your output? What is your outcome? What do you want to achieve? And can you measure that? And below the line is what's going into the process. Is that working hours? Is it machine hours? Is it a combination of those? But think about, you know, what is the outcome? What are the resources going into it? And the difference between that is ultimately what productivity is. And everybody may define it in a slightly different way. I don't mind as long as it is something that's operational and effective within the firm.
NC: Okay, so with that in mind, Lu, when you go into an organisation to try and help them with their working practices with their performance and efficiency, do you inevitably find the same set of barriers to higher productivity?
LM: Of course, it varies per organisation. But I think what you've absolutely nailed there Bart, around, you know, that definition of productivity, that tends to be where we start in terms of helping people get very clear on what it is they're trying to achieve. Because as you've said, you know, productivity is such a huge word, we want to be more productive. What does that mean? What does that actually mean to people? Because is it more widgets? Is it more quality widgets? Is it more widgets at a lower cost? You have to get very, very clear and be very specific about what it is we are trying to achieve and make sure that that is broken down really well to a local level so that individuals so that teams can, I guess, connect their individual effort to organisational outcomes, because it's only then that you're going to really get the benefit of having lots of people working towards the same thing.
NC: So Lu, to be clear, what you're saying is that when you go into organisations, you see a lack of clarity about tasks and about outcomes.
LM: Absolutely.
SB: I would completely agree with that statement, Lu. I think productivity is often, to your point, measured at a top level organisationally, but how do you measure it at a role level? So for me, it kind of comes down to three things. When any one of these three things is missing, I think value and productivity drop. So for me, clarity, like you've just said, Lu, are people clear on the expectations of their role, what the priorities are, what are the decision rights, what are the ways of working? I think the next bit that needs to be really clear is the capability. What are the skills, the tools, the systems? I mean, we're introducing technology faster than I think colleagues can build the capability to match it. If they're not equipped on how to deal with some of that tech, how can we then really leverage the tech? And I think the third dimension for me, which is quite important, and I'm not sure if this is the right descriptor for it, is the energy. How engaged are people? What's the wellbeing? What's the workload sustainability? Are people feeling psychologically safe in that environment? So I think productivity can be emotional before it's operational. I think it's the mixture of those three things and it's getting it in that right balance. I don't think you can have one without the other.
NC: And Bart, does your research show that's true?
BvA: Yeah, I'd really want to add to that because I really like what Sharon is saying here. So clarity is absolutely important. I quite often call it a narrative. I always go into companies and say, you all say we need to become more productive, but what is the story here? And what are you telling your people about what it means? Because frankly, productivity isn't always a very popular term. It's most of the time people think, okay, that's budget cuts, that's cost efficiencies, that could potentially be the end of my job.
NC: It's actually quite alienating, isn't it? If you say to somebody, we're going to have a drive on your productivity. How do you get people to understand it kind of is in their interest in the long term?
BvA: We know that productivity is driving better business performance. There's plenty of evidence around it. We know that it actually creates better workers. We know that it creates more engaged workers. We know it creates more healthy workers, surprisingly, but only if you have clarity around what your narrative is. Only if you're very clear about your second point Sharon what your capabilities are, what are the resources and are you nurturing those resources? And secondly, your point of the energy, productivity is about the transformation process. It's how you go from these capabilities to these outcomes and how you organise the transformation process. And all along, you have to take people with you in that process. And if you don't, productivity becomes efficiency and budget cuts and everything that people don't particularly like.
LM: I think you're absolutely right. And I think so often efficiency gets conflated with productivity. New tech, as you say, Sharon, new tech, new processes, they can absolutely help us do things more quickly, more efficiently. But what do we do with that time saved? Because that's where you get the increased productivity, if we can take that time saved, it would be very intentional about what we do with it and what we're asking colleagues to do with it, making sure that they've got that clarity of vision. Again, to use that phrase, that psychological safety, to actually be able to hold your hand up and say, I've got capacity. I'm finished. Give me something else to do. And that's where, as a people function, we can really support the idea around values and behaviours. So what is it we want from the people within our organisation? What do we value? What do we want them to be able to say? We need to make sure that they feel comfortable to challenge some of those unhelpful norms. You know, being asked to join that meeting with another 15 other people where you're fairly certain you're not going to say anything, never mind add any value, to actually be able to say, you know what, send me the bullet points and I'll read them because I'm busy doing something else that adds value.
SB: But do you know what? I personally think HR could be involved in all three of those elements. If you think about the clarity in the narrative part, that's about what's the purpose, what's the why? And how can we articulate that why from a comms perspective of why we've got to do some of these things. The capabilities definitely play into our sweet spot of what we do about strategic workforce planning, what capabilities will we need in the future. And then if you think of that psychological safety and that engagement and wellbeing, I think all of those are in our space to play in and therefore HR has a huge role to play.
I think where we've maybe overplayed some of that strength is around the inclusivity where you end up having so many people in a meeting to try and make a decision. And everybody wants to be involved and you want to be an inclusive employer and you want everybody to be there. And people get a little bit of FOMO because they're not in the room. But it's about, I think there's an element of trust. This is your accountability and we're going to trust you to make that decision. And we don't need to be in the room or have 30 of us in that meeting for you to make that call. So there is an element of, that fine balance of trusting people, clarity of what's within their role and what's within someone else's. And rather than a RACI model, I quite like the “Do It” model of who's the decision maker, who's owning the doing it, who needs to be involved and who do you just need to trust that someone else is going to do it and you don't need to be in the room.
NC: I'm sure trust is something which is often forgotten or not given enough prominence. Bart, can we move on to this rather useful list which you produced in a recent report about the sort of people-based levers, I think you called them, that are required in your view or seem to be essential in increasing productivity? You talk about skills building, we've mentioned leadership, the nature of the design of the work, and then organisational ability, diversity, wellbeing and engagement.
BvA: Well, you got them, all six. Then actually to Sharon's point, I don't think HR might be at the table. I think HR should be at the table when it is about productivity, because we find that those six points really are critical in the conversation and the HR leader has to be part of that. So skills, of course, is sort of a traditional thing. We're all aware that training and things are important. Skills now go far beyond that because it now has to do with competencies and ability of people to actually adjust to new tasks and new roles. So that's obvious.
Leadership and management, it's very interesting. Quite often when I do these presentations around these key drivers, some people would say it's all about management and leadership. I would say, no, it's not, but management and leadership is a very important part of the secret sauce. About bringing various elements together. And the trust factor that Sharon mentioned is very important.
Transformative work design, big word, but basically just put yourself in the space of today where we all want to use artificial intelligence technology, we’ll probably get to talk about that a bit more. It has major implications for the way we are designing work in the organisation. And obviously, again, a very important people and HR component to this.
Resilience and agility, so that ability for people to adjust in this type of organisation is critical. Move from this idea of we are always busy, which is what you get when you are in an agile and resilient organisation to something like, I'm on the job at the right time, at the right moment, and at the right place, which is basically what agility and resilience is about.
Diversity, it disappeared a little bit to the background, but there is so much evidence that diverse organisations, when it comes to age, to gender, to ethnic backgrounds, matter a lot for the performance of organisations. There's so much complementarity. It's really something that should be continuously celebrated. And then finally, you already mentioned worker wellbeing and engagement. And interestingly, we find it going both ways, right? Of course, more engaged workers are more productive, but more productive workers are a lot more engaged if we get them more productive in the right way. So those sort of six elements are part of the mix of the people factor in organisations.
NC: I just wonder whether I might challenge the wellbeing assertion there. Obviously, we've seen revolution in the consideration that employers give their employees and their aspirations and their concern among particularly younger workers for their wellbeing and so on, aren't some of those concessions that employers have given, mitigating against increasing productivity. You give people more flexibility, more time off or whatever it is, they're not actually going to deliver in terms of output.
SB: I don't believe it's been a bad thing. Mental health and wellbeing was one of the biggest things that changed our culture from being a very macho, you know, brown wooden, you know, panels where PAs would set lunches out, to actually it was okay not to be okay and have a conversation. So I think wellbeing has been great for people, we've secured many people back into work through different adopting a slightly different policy. So I'm a massive advocate and I think wellbeing is that untapped gem, if you get that right, can be the biggest changer for a culture in an organisation that, do you know what, you expect me to work hard for you when you need me, well you have my back when I need you.
Again, they need to be written in a way that catches the 95% of people in who will need them and will thrive and will benefit from them. And there's always going to be the odd one or two that take the mickey and I need this, I'm having a bad mental health day. But that is not, in the main, most people, in all fairness, people in the main are good.
BvA: If you spend about one third of your day, of your 24-hour day in an organisation, you must be out of your mind if you think that wellbeing during that period of time doesn't matter. It's of critical importance, and the research is very clear on it. Now, having said that, it's not easy. Wellbeing is not just putting a table tennis thing in your organisation. Or just do some yoga over lunch. It can help for some people, but that's not what wellbeing is about. Wellbeing is about putting people in a mindset that they can see a good balance between the work and the rest of the life that they're leading, that they think it's part of what they do during the day, and that they feel good about that. And it's very important that the organisation plays a role in this.
Now, to Sharon's point, a lot of this comes, by the way, to line managers, because they are so critical in this wellbeing story, but they quite often the pressure from the top to say, you need to get your targets, you need to do this, you need to do that. And by the way, you also need to look after your people. So I think a critical part of the wellbeing story is indeed in how we equip line managers to actually make it in a way that people go to the organisation and feel good about the job that they're doing. Because if you feel good about the job you're doing, you'll be productive.
SB: All of your six points there will contribute towards wellbeing. Do I know what my job is? Do I know what I'm meant to be doing? Do I feel capable enough to be able to do it? Do I trust my boss is going to give me a steer if I'm going off path? Is it a diverse workforce where lots of our independent views are considered and actually we're treated all fairly and equitably? So I think a lot of it's down to your six points to be fair. There isn't a one silver bullet that's going to fix it. I think it's the mix depending on the organisation, but I do think it's, I think, overlook it at your peril, wellbeing, I would say, for an organisation and productivity.
NC: Lu McKay, I was struck by something you said when we talked beforehand. We have touched on it again here about the skills required to be productive and to prioritise, to ask for help, to form good habits, to influence others. You were saying to me people may need to be taught such skills. I wonder how do you do that?
LM: It's a really valid factor in that. So often we assume people have skills that they don't. Some of those sort of key skills around productivity, you know, it's sort of seen as common sense and quite often common sense is not. So I think, you know, absolutely right in terms of, you know, how can we make sure that we're giving our people the best baseline? So around, you know, can you prioritise, well, do you know how to do that? Have you ever been taught how to do that? Thinking about forming great habits, that isn't necessarily kind of knowledge that people enter your organisation with. Asking for help. Now, that's a really key one. You've got to have a culture where it's okay to ask for help. And that obviously feeds into the idea of psychological safety and wellbeing and something that people managers could play a massive part in creating. But actually how to ask for help well, you know, in terms of thinking kind of some of those kind of real kind of coaching skills around how you can really get the help that you need.
Communications and influencing, again, they are huge factors in enabling you to get your job done and get it done well. So I think, from a learning and development point of view, it's really important that we are providing for that and really, like I say, upskilling our people. It could be, you know, part of your sort of almost your onboarding in terms of the things that we value around here, actually, it forms part of that, those initial 12 months perhaps. I think making sure that people have those right skills is incredibly important to actually put the foundations in place if we're then asking people to deliver against certain aspects of the business.
BvA: Yeah, it's useful to make a distinction between hard skills and soft skills. So hard skills traditionally refer to what we all think in first things about skills. So there's, for example, STEM, right? Science, technology, engineering, maths, but I would add writing and reading to it, which are very useful skills as well. Those things you can learn, you can improve on them also over time. But then there are the softer skills, which Lu is really referring to. This is about collaboration skills, negotiation skills, even conflict management skills and other kinds of social elements. That's always been important. But what the research clearly shows is that with particularly new digital technologies, these softer skills, interestingly, actually become more important. Because if you want to use these digital technologies productively, it means you have to think very differently in the way that you collaborate, that you work these technologies in order to ultimately produce the products and services you want your customer to have.
NC: Is this a reason why we've seen this sort of explosion in AI and technology, but we haven't seen a simultaneous increase in productivity?
BvA: Well, there's a lot going on there. Why productivity doesn't yet translate into the macroeconomic aggregate productivity growth rates. Some of it is just a matter of time, but you're absolutely right that one reason it is a matter of time is that just using AI for doing your emails faster or making meeting notes and things like that sounds great, but the aggregate impact on productivity for a firm is actually quite small. What really matters here is how you're integrating these new technologies in the way, we talked about transformation and capabilities before, the way that you integrate these technologies in your business process and in your business innovation model. And that does require this work design that I was referring to earlier as being really completely transformed. That takes time, it's difficult, needs experimentation, needs a lot of willingness from people to try and fail as well, which sometimes is difficult. So this stuff will take quite a bit of time and some organisations will succeed and others don't. And the key difference between organisations are organisations that are focused on what we call continuous learning, which is a culture where people are continuously willing to improve those skills. Don't need to be pushed by the leaders to do it, but just know that if I every day try to do a little bit better, then, you know, I will actually be able to develop these skills in order to become more productive.
NC: And while people are learning, Sharon, we of course need to often measure their performance. HR is always doing performance checks on people. I just wonder though, if it's possible to be rated as a good performer yet the reality is you're actually not very productive. I wonder, are we rating and measuring people correctly sometimes?
SB: Well, there's an interesting one, isn't it? Because I mean, that goes back to the original point of if you've got clarity of what that role is meant to be doing, how you measure those accountabilities and that work so that you can then set a target against it and how then does that aggregate up to the overall business performance. What a lot of functions fail to do is have you calibrated the objectives you set at the beginning of the year against the goals so that all goals of an equal level of an equal value have a similar, you know, scale and scope of objectives so that when you then moderate at the quarterly or the six monthly, you're not just moderating a rating, you're moderating the ask and the delivery against the ask. And I find time and time again, functions just go straight to, I don't think they're good, but actually they're great against what you've asked them to do. And this is the size of the ask. So it all boils back down to that clarity. And if you've not got that, I think you'll always find performance management hard to capture.
And I think Nigel, you and I had this conversation about how HR needs to think a little bit more like marketing. So my view is, everybody gets marketing. Everybody gets that their role is to attract new customers. They will have various personas for their customers to be able to target the right messages, the right products and services to those customers so that they can maximise the share of that wallet or how many times they shop with you. That they will, you know, they get the best out of that customer and that customer experience. If we swap C of customer with C with colleague, that is HR's gig. How do we attract the right colleagues? How do we have our various personas so that we target the right messages, the right colleague experiences to, you know, to bring out the best in those colleagues so they deliver the best performance so that they will stay, be advocates of recommending other people to join you, and also clarity for those that don't fit in you professionally and respectfully manage them and either stay and turn it around or they go. And have we mapped out enough of the colleague experience for them as well as us of what productivity is? And I think it cuts both ways so that everybody's clear on the deal of working there. This is what we expect. This is what, you know, you can expect from us. And, you know, the deal's both ways. I think sometimes, you know, when you talk productivity and performance management, it's just how much can we eke a little bit more out of a colleague in all fairness. And actually, they choose as much to choose us as an employer as we choose them as an employee.
BvA: And that's again, clarity and narrative that we talked about earlier.
SB: Exactly
BvA: If you've got the narrative right, I mean, what's the point of developing performance measures if the story about what you want to achieve isn't there and isn't in people's minds?
SB: Exactly.
NC: I'd like to end with something of a to-do list for people who are thinking about productivity. Lu McKay, obviously you've been in number of organisations, helping them with all this. Just give us a few headlines of things that you could best do to start tackling productivity.
LM: I'm conscious, I'm coming back to that slightly broken record, but it's about that clarity. It really is, you know, I worked with a car manufacturer and they were looking to increase productivity. Increase a number of their, one of their sort of flagship vehicles that were coming off the line at the end of the every day. And they've been working on it and guess what? They've seen lower quality. Guess what? They've seen siloed mentality because they’ve just been under pressure. We need more, we need more. And actually what we did is we worked with them to start from pick up and what do we mean by, you know, what does productivity look like?
So we got very clear on a few things and it was around, you know, no siloed mentality. So we talked about zero faults forward. It had to be about quality. We had to make sure that you own your space so that you could complete a task and pass it forward in a really, really good space. It was also around zero harm, so zero accidents. Actually, yes, productivity is a priority here, but it, you know, health and safety is still the most important thing to us. We don't want productivity at all costs. We want to make sure that we're looking after our people, whether that's physically or mentally. And we talked about one team and actually looking at, you know, the reward and the recognition processes that were in place to support that project. So that actually we were encouraging the behaviours, we're thinking zero, zero faults forward, no silos, very safe working practices, thinking beyond our area, but being very specialised in what we do. But the team got rewarded when the team achieved as an organisation. That plant were rewarded when we hit that number. And by breaking it down, being very, very clear, not assuming knowledge, not assuming skill, enabling people to hold their hand up and being very clear about if they don't know something, that's okay because we want to hear it because we can help you. Those are the things that make the difference and enable you to really, really kind of push that, push that project forward, everybody makes it go faster.
NC: Sharon, a few priorities from you.
SB: It's really difficult to build on that, to be fair. I mean, it is the, I mean, the clarity, the capability, and the energy. Those 3 dimensions for me, I think, have got to be there. And to Bart's point, are you really clear on the narrative? to your business as to, what does productivity look like at a role level, at a function level, and at a business-wide level so that everybody can see the part they have to play in that business success.
Lu, you touched upon it before there. And what's the reward and recognition when you do it? What's the consequences if you don't? And what's the reward and recognition and the praise you will get for delivering that either as an individual or as a collective team. So I think it's a, back to where we started, clarity, capability, the energy and real clarity of what do we mean by productivity that's bespoke for that organisation against its own narrative? What does good look like?
LM: You're right, Sharon. I think that reward is very much, you have to look at both implicit and explicit reward because that's where the culture is so key and you're having your people managers on board, you're having those right policies in place, Sharon, that are the kind of catch all or catch out because, you know, we have to make sure that in the moment, do you have to wait to the end of your review? But in the moment, the right behaviours are being encouraged and praised. Couldn't agree more.
SB: And that's where that clarity of, you know, when you say capability and skills, to Bart's point, you know, what are the hard skills versus the behaviours and the values? How do you embed those into your recruitment processes, your performance management processes, your development processes? It's not easy. And that's why, you know, the CIPD is there to kind of help educators. You know, you're doing your research, Bart, because if it was really easy, we'd all be doing it. But as businesses are evolving, as people are evolving, I think we're going to have something like six generations in the workplace. And we've got to start thinking, I think back to, you know, I hate to bang the drum again, what are those various personas and how can we be flexible in work to get the best out of each generation who will have a different motivation, a different driver, but still be doing similar work? And I think people are looking for more personalisation. I don't think it's one-size-fits-all. How can we do that in a really clear and consistent way that doesn't chaos, but that actually talks to the individual who's come to work and wants to do a great job in that day and be really productive?
LM: And that's absolutely full and intentional about the outcomes rather than the kind of the nitty gritty micromanagement.
NC: And Bart, round this off for us in terms of what you found in your research.
BvA: So just two things that I would want to add. First of all, it's important to realise that productivity is about a lot of things in your organisation. And therefore, when leaders say we need to become more productive, it sounds like we need to change everything. And if you try to change everything at once, it's driving people nuts and it makes your organisation a lot less productive. Change processes are quite often not very well thought through, in terms of what are we going to change? In particular prioritisation, what do we need to do first? Think of it as a pipeline with bottlenecks in it. You obviously want to begin to tackle there where the biggest bottleneck is rather than try to do everything else.
Now, the problem with prioritisation, the biggest problem is deprioritisation. And a very important skill of a leader is to indicate why we are going to deprioritise something, which we may want to address later. But we first need to resolve that first bottleneck because nothing else will change unless we solve that. And a lot of examples where we can see that. So thinking, be a bit disciplined as a leader about what productivity means and what I want to change is very important.
And then the last thing I would say is, you know, we talked a lot about productivity is about collaboration. So I want to go back to where we started, Nigel, when you said what we thought our most productive day was. But maybe it's much more important every day to think, not was it my productive day, but did I actually help other people in my organisation to become more productive, right? Did what I do help other people to become more productive, or did I have an incredibly productive day moving a lot of stuff around, ordering people lots of things to do, but as a matter of fact, they got really annoyed with me and they become less productive because of this. So collaboration is so important. And think about how can I make a day more productive for somebody else in my organisation.
NC: Excellent. Well, a big thank you to our trio of Bart van Ark, Sharon Benson and Lu McKay for a highly productive half hour or so. Certainly the message that productivity is about better management and more engaged workers has come through loud and clear. We can maybe do no better than end with the words of the management author Peter Drucker. He defined productivity as the multiplication of efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency, he said, is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things. And that's a wrap from me, Nigel Cassidy and the CIPD podcast team for 2025. So season's greetings from us all. We'll be here with more great guests and timely workplace topics in 2026.
