Productivity, Like Building a Thriving Workplace Culture, is a Journey

Wally Bock, whom I've cited many times before, has another great post on his Three Star Leadership blog this week. Questioning the validity of the perennial stock of studies finding that employees waste "several bazillion dollars" each year during time they should be working, he urges business leaders to

Just throw away your notions that you can get 100 percent productivity. It's not human. It's not natural. It won't work.

As Bock acknowledges, this is not to say that leaders shouldn't keep their eye on the productivity ball, through everything from MBWA to ROWE to Six Sigma. But achieving total productivity is indeed a fallacy.

Leaders should just aim to create a more productive workplace every day. They should take a cue from Google, which pioneered the practice (now a trend) of allowing workers a full 20% of their time to explore personal, creative interests.

This may seem counterintuitive to some, but the bottom line is that approaches like this have been shown to improve employee engagement and retention over the long term because they help convince workers that their employers care about them as a whole person, not just as a business asset. We explored this with some depth when we profiled the employee leadership development practices at Best Boss Mike Faith's firm Headsets.com.

Related: To help you improve your productivity over time, start with these 30 proven strategies.

Photo credit: TrekEarth/lucinka

Comments for Productivity, Like Building a Thriving Workplace Culture, is a Journey

Sunday, April 11, 2010 by Wally Bock:: Thanks for the kind words about my post, Mark. And thanks for adding to the discussion. I liked the way you linked the productivity issue to Headsets.com and to productivity strategies. I like those examples far better than Google on this issue. As the Times article you link to says: "GOOGLE engineers are encouraged to take 20 percent of their time to work on something company-related that interests them personally." Note that only engineers get this opportunity. Evidently it's not in Google's interest to have HR folks spend time to solve HR problems or to find opportunities to seize. Admin assistants or janitors or security guards or IT techs: nobody but engineers gets that 20 percent of time that Google trumpets.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010 by Mark:: Thanks, Wally. You know, I did notice that narrow definition after I linked to that, and remembered seeing that in some other coverage of that practice and thought it was odd. In a culture that's so open and egalitarian in other ways at Google, that caveat does stand out. It makes me wonder how many calls they've gotten, from inside and out, to broaden it to other departments and job functions.