Productivity Tools Can = Less Productivity

One of the biggest surprises in the last six months has been realizing the contrast between the vast amount of data, content and knowledge that we have available to us as a collective business community, but the lack of access and fragmented information experiences we have as individuals. This disconnect impacts our effectiveness across our workforce: our customer care team could be better informed, our product and engineering teams more independent, our professional services team more efficient, and our sales team more intuitive, the list goes on and on. It’s clear that addressing this fragmentation is crucial for our collective success.

It took listening to a clip from the Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, speaking about the power of information; the power of all working off the same song sheet, operating from the same truths and direction to remind me of all the trial and error I’ve learned from working in a distributed way the last 17 years: You must constantly examine the impact of operating rhythms and context on productivity.

To that end, I wanted to share my recent? ‘ah ha’ moment when it struck me that I am leading a company that has one productivity tool for every two employees, yet the pace in which we are moving [or I want to move, which my staff laughs about] is still not fast enough.

When you search on the internet about how to achieve heightened productivity, it is all about digital tooling. While I believe this is a part of the equation, you also need to deeply understand how you are measuring productivity [a task list? achieving an OKR?] alongside the root cause of what creates unproductive behavior in remote and non-remote workforces; though, I do believe information flow challenges get exacerbated in distributed environments because you can’t swing by IRL and state “I don't understand–can you clarify?”?

So, if productivity tools alone are unproductive: what people and process considerations might be at play? I have three theories.

Theory 1: Unconnected Workforce Tooling

Unconnected Tooling is masked, or sometimes exacerbated, as a software expense line item. I did the common thing when I joined my company, starting with how do we cut costs, how do we get to the magic number of $10K / employee on software? Through this experience, it struck me that this was not about saving $$$ here or there, this was about streamlining the user [our employee] experience across our suite of tools to unlock the potential of our employees, for them to do more with less, for them to experience value creation each day, for them to have access to the right information that is in context to what they are focused on.? No one needs all information all the time, that creates noise and ‘100 windows open’ paralysis; digital tooling, at its best, expedites? knowledge and communication to solve the job to be done in that moment.??

For example, knowing your customers to better service them is the holy grail in all businesses, but if only cohorts of employees know pieces of your customer journey from prospect to servicing, or the customer record says one thing in one tool versus another, how can you understand the full context of what they need, want?

Theory 2: Discontinuous Communication Flow??

As organizations grow, contextual understanding of strategy and decisions matters more. Flat organizations and repetitive communication increases the probability that the telephone game of passing down information isn’t watered down and the nuance of the messaging isn’t lost. However, as noted in Theory 1, the rise of productivity tools, if not connected, if not understood how to use them, and if not managed, not only create noise but add to the unproductivity due to lack of consistent knowledge and clear resources to make decisions.??

Information flow, accurate information flow, be it on a company strategy, a customer, a priority, or a problem needs to find its way throughout an employee experience journey. Caring for that is timely and could be perceived as a minor problem for a CEO to focus on, however a CEO who wants to grow a company cost effectively and expeditiously, cares about increasing the productivity of their workforce.? If information flow, consistent and accurate, is a catalyst for productive behavior, removing friction from the self-serve approach to discovery is in fact a worthy cause.?

Theory 3: Misperceived Decision Authority

In the name of speed, my goal is to push decision making down to the most junior person in the company possible, but this is incongruent with the ‘follow the leader’ mindset that creeps into productivity tools.?

Once a C-level is added to an email or Slack channel, there is this shift in the workforce. An unconscious or conscious bias that that new entrant, the highest ranking person, is the decision maker.? Discussions go on and on, and no one steps in to make the call, so an executive gets impatient and makes the decision… perpetuating the behavior.??

Who holds the pen? Who can decide? In a distributed workforce you have to declare this at the outset.? The higher the title, the more decision power [obvious] but an organization will get stuck without sufficiently scaled decision making for your desired rate of growth.

Going back to Jensen Huang, he speaks about how there should be no privileged access to information,? that everyone should have an opportunity to contribute to solving the problem, that equal access to information empowers people. I agree. Knowledge is power and in our company, at Versapay, power is shared not withheld. I want knowledge to be accessible to those who are curious to ask the questions, and vulnerable enough to ask for help.??

This is why I love the possibilities of GenAI. What made Google so beautiful when it was released and why it has sustained the decades of change is how the simplicity of the experience masked the complexity of the information web underneath. Take this consumer experience and compare it to your professional one. I imagine you’ll find a stark contrast with much of your time spent on discovery of information.? Was it in Monday, was it in Salesforce, in slack, email, Smartsheet, tried and true Excel or Word. What about Trello, Asana, Notion, Lucidchart, or maybe Figma? We are paying people to discover information they already created or consumed, not spend time on creating new ideas or forging ahead. The brain, the internal knowledge system for a company should be one like Google, ask a question and get an answer.

We have some promising internal experiments underway at Versapay to demonstrate the power of connectivity and clarity. And, one of my focus areas looking forward will be how we democratize easy access to our commercial truths, content that can elevate all of our knowledge about our business, our customers, and our industry.? To reimagine what access to information, content strategy and learning forums look like for a growth company keen to leverage–not get lost in–digital tools.