Einstein's Theory of Productivity?

When you read that some companies are now targeting toilet breaks to improve productivity, you know that employers are really scraping the bottom of the ‘bowl'! 

An article shared by my good friend Sian Harrington a few weeks ago raises a number of key questions, most notably around the correlation between engagement and productivity. (Companies target toilet breaks to improve productivity)

A great tenet of Stephen Covey which I have always lived by is Habit #5, ‘seek first to understand, then be understood’. And this is where, in my experience, most management decisions go wrong. We seem to constantly operate in a symptom-reactive context where we treat the problem and not the cause. And as we know from the current coronavirus outbreak, treating the problem is often far more complex than preventing it in the first place!

Treat the cause, not the symptom

Supporting Managers to understand how to uncover and tackle the root cause of team performance issues is a critical focus area which we explored during a recent Active Manager Coach Accreditation workshop at our BearingPoint UK head office in London.

An anecdote from this session centred on a classic situation encountered during a recent programme where we raised the productivity of the front-line managers and their teams within a customer service contact centre.

A Team Manger was frustrated with the lack of productivity of one of their team members. When asked what they felt was at the heart of their problem: - “laziness, sheer laziness” was the answer. Apparently “any opportunity to duck and dive their way through the day” (including the afore-mentioned extended break times, and toilet breaks) was taken advantage of. 

Managers need to become 'behavioural detectives'

Now, as any Leadership Coach worth their salt will know, quite often what we see (the symptom) is very rarely the cause, as was the case with this example. So, an exploration not unlike that undertaken by a detective then ensued.

Like the veritable Poirot we were looking for patterns, connections and drivers of this behaviour and encouraging the Manager to fully understand how what they saw, was merely a clue to what currently lay unseen - the potential cause of what was at its root; disengagement.

Now whilst the story ended well with the root cause identified, up-skilling, coaching and short-term pithy goals planned in along with a welcome rise in engagement, the most important change was that found in the manager themselves. A new-found realisation that as a Team Manager, engagement was not only their responsibility, but their priority. A deeper understanding that very few people come to work to deliberately do a ‘bad’ job and that, put simply, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, (cause and effect), is alive and well - in this case the relationship between engagement, morale and productivity.

Engagement drives increased productivity. Fact!

It took only a few hours of coaching, and a little focused effort on the part of the Team Manager to make not only a significant difference to that one team member’s engagement and performance, but the productivity of their business area, as a whole. 

This isn’t new ‘news’ - we have been debating the link between engagement and productivity as far back as 1924 following the release of Elton Mayo’s research at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company. More recently, The London School of Economics conducted meta-analysis of over 300 independent Gallup studies reporting on nearly 2 million employees in relation to wellbeing and productivity concluding that “higher employee wellbeing is associated with higher productivity and firm performance”. (London School of Economics - Employees-and-their-impact-on-firm-performance )

'Enforcement' is a short term fix, not a long term productivity solution

Sad then that within some organisations, board level decisions are still made ‘symptomatically’ as a knee-jerk reaction to the ‘tip of the iceberg’ in front of them as opposed to the foundational evidence beneath the surface. Rather than enforcing the monitoring of toilet breaks, employers need to recognise that productivity will continue to go ‘down the toilet’ without meaningful interventions supporting management at all levels to develop behavioural acuity, EQ and the tools to raise and sustain employee engagement.