Missed Deadlines, Long Hours—It's Time to Talk to Your CEO About Your Team’s Productivity Problem

Imagine this scenario: Your CEO is not happy with your team’s numbers this quarter, and when assessing where the issue could be, your remote team’s productivity is called into question. Uh oh!?

“You must make sure they are being productive,” the executive tells you. “You must keep them motivated. Is the problem that they are not coming into the office anymore? Have you been checking in regularly as I suggested?”

You tell him you have. And it’s true. In fact, you’ve done all of the following:

• Lead a daily standup meeting?
• Check in every few hours to determine whether there will be any delays?
• Conduct weekly review meetings

So, what could the problem be??

Your team’s productivity problem is a distraction problem?

Even though your team is aligning every morning and checking in regularly for updates, the deliverables are still delayed. It’s clear that visibility is causing distractions.

A large portion of knowledge work is invisible. In the same way scientists are studying how Dark Matter influences the universe, you must understand how the Dark Matter of Work affects your organization.?

This unobservable work includes message threads, video calls, and emails. While insignificant on their own, together these tasks add up to a full workday.?

To bring these issues to light, you must ask:?

• How long are daily Zoom meetings?
• How long does it take your team to reset after every time you request an update?
• How much time does your team spend flipping between tools searching for details about a task??
• When they can’t find a detail, how long before they ping you asking where it is??

The problem is now becoming clear

Meetings are keeping employees from doing their work, but business leaders don’t know how to reduce them. For instance, although we’ve seen a 20% decrease in the length of meetings during the pandemic, the average worker attended 13.5% more meetings.

“Okay, if distraction is the problem, just cut out the meetings and please moderate Slack,” your CEO says. “Make sure they are focused. No more cat memes.”?

But aren’t meetings and status updates still necessary? How else will you be aware of what your team is working on? How do you keep people engaged—especially remote-first teams—without communication??

Pressure is building, and you’re concerned heading into the next quarter that the distraction problem for your remote team will continue. How can you rephrase this problem to the CEO to actually get his attention? How can you properly support your team without being a micromanager??

Most importantly, how can you save your job??

The 3 perspectives of the distraction problem

When it comes to increasing productivity, each side has their own opinions and biased perspectives.?

Executive leadership is wired to top-line growth and bottom-line financial performance. They don’t engage in work like the rest of the company. Their recommendation to ignore Slack, attend fewer meetings, and book focus time isn’t always a reality for most teams.

Managers have to communicate and manage up and down. They are under the gun to explain results and make sure the numbers hit. They’re stuck in the middle, paralyzed, not knowing how to engage.?

Front-line employees are tasked with lower-level execution. They must participate and communicate, meaning they can’t simply opt out of Zoom or Slack. If they go offline, they fear the repercussions. So, they stay online and open themselves up to the torrent of communication that hits them all day long.?

It is time to close the gap and recognize that everyone will benefit from improved performance. But how can you paint a better picture for the whole organization to understand??

Why CEOs don’t understand managers’ problems?

To better illustrate your challenge, you must first understand how your CEO’s day differs from yours and your team’s.?

While everyone has the same 24 hours a day, most executives have become masters in managing their time. (They wouldn’t be in their position otherwise.) But they also have resources to support them that your team doesn’t. Freed from being in the trenches, CEOs can focus on high-level challenges.?

Decision fatigue is something executives are very conscious about. An average person makes approximately 35,000 decisions per day, and 87% of people admit to changing their minds after making a choice. As a leader of a company, flip-flopping on a decision could be costly.?

Therefore, CEOs limit trivial involvement. That way, when something critical comes up or when it’s time for them to enter a high-pressure meeting, they will have the mental stamina to process their options.?

Here are some common traits of high-functioning CEOs:?

1. Their schedules are very structured, with agendas optimized to get the most out of their time. Mastering their calendar is the only way they can ensure that everything they need to do gets done.
2. CEOs only attend important meetings, where they listen, talk little, and make firm decisions. As Basecamp’s Jason Fried tells us: “Meetings should be like salt—a spice sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured recklessly over every forkful. Too much salt destroys a dish. Too many meetings destroy morale and motivation.”
3. The CEO reminds the team of the grand vision of the company. They keep the organization aligned with the north star rather than helping everyone they hire get out of the weeds.?
4. Travel is a big part of their schedules. While video calls are efficient, executives tend to build relationships face-to-face.?
5. Health is vital to a CEO’s output, and they know it. While they may work long days—on average, a CEO works 9.7 hours a day—when they are off, they are off.?

Odds are your CEO’s day is fully booked, just like yours.?

How can you convince your CEO that your team has a distraction problem??

Now that we understand how a CEO spends their time, you can approach them more effectively with your team’s problems.?

Let’s return to that original issue and break it down:?

1. Your CEO wants the team to increase productivity and hit goals.?
2. For your team to work together and get the job done, they need to collaborate. However, the tools and workflow are pulling them out of the work itself.?
3. You, as the manager, want to support your team. But when you do, you add another layer of friction.?

Now, look at it from the CEO’s perspective. They’re thinking: What is the cost of all the meetings, notifications, and distractions??

Let’s quantify that so you can communicate it and reach a decision together.?

According to APQC, an average knowledge worker can spend:?

• 3.6 hours a week managing internal communications
• 2.8 hours searching for information
• 2.2 hours in unproductive meetings

Add it all up and you get one heck of an expensive problem. Your CEO will want you to keep an eye on that.?

Now that you have their attention, what can you do??

Before you can implement change and determine whether it’s effective or not, you’ll need digital work analytics. This collaboration tool measures where time is lost in a workday.?

At Produce8, we recently ran a few experiments to see how we can work more effectively. Take a look at our article “The Problems We Uncovered When We Audited Our Entire Team's Slack Usage,” where we share our discoveries.

We approach the idea of productivity from many different angles. You’d be hard-pressed to overcome a CEO’s belief that remote worker productivity is causing issues until you show them it’s the tools that are at fault. They don’t have full visibility of the digital day of a front-line worker. You need data to get them there and to enable them to make a firm decision. Only then can they go back to their work and you go back to yours without any further worries.?

With visibility into everyone’s workflow, your team can acquire that data, implement changes to function more efficiently, and then test to see whether everything is working out as planned. Follow Produce8’s blog for more resources to improve operational awareness.?