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Linked – Productivity is outdated. Here’s why.
When you have that blurring, though, the idea that you can measure productivity the same way as you did when we spent 8 hours building a widget seems a little overly simplistic, doesn’t it?
The challenge is finding the thing we can measure to evaluate whether people are accomplishing the goals we set for them, but those goals can’t be the “number of things or hours” when the work is so much more than that.
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Linked – Monitoring Individual Employees Isn’t the Way to Boost Productivity
I am convinced that the best managers are the ones who help remove obstacles to doing good work. Every organization has them. It’s a question of how effectively they can be navigated. In toxic environments, it’s not possible. In healthy ones overcoming obstacles is possible, and that is where managers focus their efforts. Monitoring every action of an individual employee does nothing to help them navigate the obstacles and does nothing to support them. It’s all a top-down case of the “gotchas.”
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Quiet Quitting isn’t New, Caregivers Have Always Had To
Herein lies the problem that many of our younger employees see and refuse to play along with. Why should our choices be between making a comfortable wage and living outside of work? Why do we live in a world where we have to “quit” being engaged in our work or decide against fully engaging in our families and communities? Moms have had to make this choice for years. Be a good mom and care for your children by lessening your career opportunities, or be a bad mom and focus on your career.
Why is that the choice?
I see article after article talking about the “loss” of productivity to companies when employees are not fully engaged. Still, no one ever calculates the loss in our communities from people who contribute nothing outside of their job. We don’t put a number on the damage done when fathers are uninvolved in kids’ lives or on the missed mental health benefits of being involved in hobbies, friendships, and community groups.
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Linked – Remote workers are feeling pressure to prove their productivity
It’s all the remote equivalent of sitting at your desk later than your coworkers to show you are hard-working. That never told anyone who was getting the most work done, but it rarely stopped bosses from using it as a proxy and rewarding people for looking like they worked hard. It’s been an issue in the workplace for years, and remote work finally allowed us to get rid of it forever if we chose to.
Or we can just keep doing it and never make any improvements.
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Linked: Mental Health Challenges are Common – and Talking about them at Work Should be Too
As I read about various companies and hear stories from a variety of peers, it becomes obvious that there might be two mindsets when it comes to managing people. One says these are human beings and should be treated as such. The other says these are labor costs and anything I can do to get more productivity from these “tools” for less money is good for my business.
Those might seem like extremes, and they are. I’ll have more to say about these extremes in a later blog post, but if you fall on the side of seeing your people as people, take a look at the suggestions. I truly believe that even in a company that does want to recognize the importance of mental health and support employees, it is still really difficult to talk about. It shouldn’t be that difficult. Consider how we can make it more acceptable and comfortable for everyone to prioritize their mental health.
