Britain’s real productivity problem? Diary molasses

Working in Silicon Valley in the heady days of the dotcom boom, demos happened over the phone and contracts were signed by fax machine. In a couple cases the only time I met people I did a deal with was if I was coincidentally introduced to them by a friend at a bar. It was a phenomenal time, when the internet was exploding and everyone shared a palpable sense of urgency to be part of this slice of history.?

We seem to have gone backwards. ?

In 20 years, business has gone from the speed of ‘are you free for a call right now?’ to the speed of ‘how about a coffee in six weeks?’.?

Last year I delivered a software demo to a whole department of a whale of a prospect. It could not have gone better — they excitedly pitched back to us the many ways that this software would increase their productivity and sales. Six months later, we’re still enjoying warm email exchanges and I’m reassured they are very keen, but it’s almost impossible to get meetings in the directors’ diaries. Productivity and sales be damned: the sticky slowdown of getting dates in the diary has defeated us. ?

Similarly, I received a call in November from someone who wanted to meet me immediately. We set up a meeting for the next day – which she then cancelled and said she wasn’t then free until January. It’s madness. In another case, a new business meeting was booked two months later because the directors are only all in the office together 1 day a week.??

In fact, the response to any diary planning nowadays is inevitably something at least three weeks away, in many cases as much as six. The most straightforward explanation is that at least some of the week has shifted to working from home. If someone is working from home two days a week, their capacity for face-to-face meetings is immediately reduced by 40%.??

If the person they’re trying to meet is also doing the same – but on different days – their capacity to meet with each other is reduced by 80%.??

Of course, they could always meet on Zoom. So why don’t they? One explanation is that our collective sense of urgency to innovate and be productive is gone — and what kind of mood is that in the face of a recession??

I call this “diary molasses” — the sticky sludge of getting meetings in that is jamming up the wheels of economic progress. Whether it’s our inability to find mutually convenient times to meet or a new habitual malaise that has us sticking meetings ‘in the long grass’, we are in part driving some of the economic go-slow.?

If investment, trade, infrastructure and innovation are fundamental to a well-oiled economy, then creating drag in their productivity by making meetings hard to schedule inevitably has a negative impact on the economy.??

If our capacity to meet is taking as much as an 80% hit, it could take four or five times longer to get business over the line. Our ability to innovate as a country is particularly relevant as we continue to shore up our resilience and leadership post-Brexit, and innovation is a fiercely time-pressured sport.?

Britain’s productivity problems are particularly acute. In 1960, the nation had the highest level of productivity in Europe, according to The Conference Board, a non-profit. That’s since slumped to the point where, a few years ago, ONS data showed the average French worker produced more by the end of Thursday than their UK counterpart could in a full week. More recently, the IMF has said it expects Britain to be the only large industrialised country to see a shrinking economy in 2023.???

Our problems could well be even worse now as figures suggest UK workers have been slower to return to offices than European ones – hampering our ability to meet people and do business. Google’s mobility report from May 2022 showed that journeys to workplaces in Britain were still 23% lower than pre-pandemic levels – more than double the percentage drop in European countries such as Germany, France and Italy.?

We can help defeat the impact of “diary molasses” through simple efficiencies such as online scheduling software. But more importantly we need to get back to the days where meeting is not an outrageous inconvenience but an urgent solution to our very real need for economic resilience.

Next time someone asks you ‘when are you free to meet?’, surprise them and say: ‘how about right now?’.?