The Dance Of Flexibility And Productivity

Harvard Business Review was valuable in the early stages of the pandemic — now two years ago, ROFL — when people had to make certain decisions they had never made before, and a leading business journalism voice needed to step up. In the last few months, they’ve become essentially insufferable, with articles like “how managers can increase flexibility without reducing productivity.” These types of articles are literally almost the entire problem with modern work.

See, it is true that a lot of managers think in this way: that “productivity” and “flexibility” are completely diametrically opposed. No. That’s not true. To have a really nuanced discussion, you need to first admit that probably 53% of the economy can’t really experience “flexibility” because they work in food or retail, and they need to physically be somewhere during a shift to produce or provide. Now you get into the other 47% and maybe half of that bucket can truly work from their fourth bedroom converted into a “study,” which is usually the high middle manager class and above. Executives barely work anyway; they show up for the big things and do the deals. They’re not on the grind 10 hours a day, although they constantly tell you they are. This is all kind of how the white-collar game is played.

In reality, “flexibility” and “productivity” are often siblings. I’ve been work-from-my-house-or-a-WeWork for seven years now. I’ve done some incredibly stupid stuff in that period, mostly related to day drinking, but I’ve also knocked out content and strategic plans for 120+ clients, often being done by 2pm in a given day because I can focus as I do laundry, as I periodically walk my dog, as I highlight a chapter in a book, etc, etc. There was actually some belief in 2015 that the “flexibility stigma” would eventually cripple the U.S. economy , and in some ways I think that kinda sorta did happen. The stock market is good, but job stuff is chaos and talent teams are in way over their heads right now with the “Resignation” narrative. The problem with the Great Resignation stuff is that the narrative is pretty flawed — we think it’s about laziness or government handouts, when really it’s about companies being pricks to their employees and having bad hiring processes — but the numbers are there in terms of people fleeing jobs because the conditions are medieval. So yes, there is a flexibility stigma, and it is hurting the economy, and a lot of comes back to this core idea that productivity and flexibility are somehow enemies.

This all lives at the complicated work intersection of relevance, control, and status — which is what most managers ultimately seek. That’s why we even need to have the whole “Can you be flexible and productive at the same time?” discussion. It’s because managers are terrified of what their peons might be doing when they can’t see said peons every second of every day. (What’s always been comical to me about that way of thinking is that often, if you sit in an office near your manager, they ignore you for weeks at a time — but I guess the fact that they know you’re sitting there is helpful to them.) This is all tied to the “two jobs” fear — managers now screeching to Wall Street Journal reporters that some of their “full-time” people are working another job, when they should be on the clock for them, goddamn it! This is super common, and it goes beyond “side hustle.” The sheer reason people can work two paid-as-full-time jobs (I’ve done it) is because managers and organizations design jobs that don’t need to be full-time and call them full-time, largely because (a) they want control and (b) they’re so focused on task work that they can’t understand what a person might actually do across 40–45 hours a week.

The narratives are flawed everywhere. Managers need to realize that affording flexibility can boost productivity (study after study on this ), and more people just need to come out and admit that work is often a vehicle for control and literally nothing else. It’s a way for men to get paychecks and feel relevant in their lives at the time their wife long since stopped finding them interesting and their kids would rather eat a Tide Pod for TikTok fame than have lunch with them. But if you have those peons to boss around, you’re still a man. Right, Troy? Right.

But no, flexibility and productivity are not enemies. They’re actually pretty close relatives.

Takes?