It’s Time to Decouple the Idea of People and Productivity

For the 2024 Milken Institute Global Conference , we asked #PowerofIdeas contributors to explore how we can collectively shape a shared future. See more coverage on the Milken Institute LinkedIn page . This article originally appeared in the Power of Ideas .

People are not machines. We know this, and yet the world largely measures human productivity based on century-old metrics for machines that automated tasks to make workers’ lives easier. When you’re counting the number of Model Ts rolling off an assembly line in a given shift, that makes sense. But somewhere along the way, we started rating the productivity of workers who market products, draft building plans, write and edit content, and do a variety of knowledge-based tasks that can’t reasonably be measured by productivity.

The problem is productivity isn’t a measure of outcome or quality. It’s a measure of output—of busyness. Workers know this doesn’t make sense, and leaders do too. In Deloitte’s 2024 Global Human Capital Trends report , only 17 percent of respondents—out of 14,000 survey respondents in 95 countries—say that their organization is extremely effective at capturing the value created by workers.

Rather than striving to make humans better at work, organizations can make work better for humans.

Traditionally, we’ve assessed productivity based on how many presentations were created, how many meetings were attended, how many calls were made (to name a few classic examples). But busy work doesn’t always move the needle—not for the person doing it and not for the company they are doing it for. It can drive people to be busy at all costs, without evaluating if that busyness is creating any actual value. Taking a moment to sit, and think, and maybe stretch while focusing on creative solutions to problems or innovative ideas can drive the business forward. Having the space to think instead of always focusing on doing is an effective way to drive creativity and innovation and ultimately produce real value.

Make no mistake, it’s effectiveness that we should all be striving for. If the slide presentation didn’t effectively convey your team’s proposal, or if you’ve been in meetings all day with no measurable outcome as a result, what did you actually accomplish?

Slowly, leaders are starting to nod their heads in time to a forward-thinking drumbeat: outcome, not output, effectiveness, not efficiency. In his book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout , Cal Newport outlines how slowing down productivity—actually reducing the volume of work assigned rather than the hours allotted to do one’s work—can improve not only mental health and work satisfaction, thereby reducing burnout, but can result in improved performance. Because we all know that when the volume of to-dos is overwhelming, it can send a person into panic or avoidance mode and end up reducing the amount of work one can reasonably get done.

It’s time to abandon the fantasy of increasing productivity in order to do more with less. That math just doesn’t add up. There are only so many hours in the day—science hasn’t yet found a way around that.

And in the meantime, workers across all industries and levels are operating from a place of fear. When layoffs happen and teams shrink, the remaining workers are inevitably scrutinized even harder. Those viewed as not being productive or busy enough risk being labeled as low performers. That fear is a self-fulfilling prophecy, limiting the potential of the individual, and, by extension, their team and their organization.

So, let’s flip the script: Rather than striving to make humans better at work, organizations can make work better for humans. Deloitte’s report presents case histories and research that shows leaders have an opportunity to redefine how they measure human performance, in order to create value for the organization, current and future workers as humans, and society at large.

Leaders don’t actually need to see someone working to know they’re doing their job. Recently, there has been a swing back to in-office requirements after years of remote work, with rallying cries of “We’re only productive when we’re in the office!” The subtext here is that leaders need to monitor workers to make sure they’re being productive. But unless those managers and executives are measuring outcomes and effectiveness—neither of which necessarily need to be witnessed in person—what looks like old-school productivity may be soul-crushing, burnout-inducing busyness. Organizations are driving their human “machines” to fail.

Innovative workplace technology will always be useful. Much like assembly lines of a century ago, today’s generative AI can be used to automate the mundane “productive” tasks in human work so that workers can focus on the uniquely human parts of their jobs. This, too, leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy, but one of growth and innovation: Mentally stimulating work and autonomy leads to a sense of self-worth and the satisfaction of finding value in one’s work, which makes people want to succeed and contribute effective outcomes that drive business forward.