Key performance indicators often are a recommended practice for improving organizational output. But knowledge work and office work in general do not allow us to create meaningful KPIs related to productivity.
The problem with all studies of officer worker or knowledge worker productivity is measurement. What can be counted so we know whether inputs have changed. And how do we measure the output of knowledge work?
Presumably a call center operation has quantifiable metrics, but most office or knowledge work does not have any obvious and convenient measurement criteria. We commonly measure “time working” with the assumption that additional time worked is better. Maybe. But hours worked is an input metric, not an output metric. It is the denominator, not the numerator.
Logically, increasing input (denominator) can work to reduce productivity (output) unless output measures also increase faster than inputs increase.
The other common issue is that we equate worker attitudes with outcomes. Happier workers might, or might not, be more productive. All we can measure is a subjective attitude. More happy or less happy does not necessarily correlate with outcomes.
In principle, one could have happier but less productive workers; less happy but more productive workers. One would need a way to correlate output and outcomes with feelings in ways that outlive simple Hawthorne effects (people work better when they know they are part of an experiment).
Work team collaboration might have fared better under full remote work conditions, but there is some evidence that firm-wide collaboration has decreased, though the amount of time spent collaborating (meetings, emails, messaging) has grown.
Actual output is different from input or collaboration time and effort. It might be difficult to measure “creativity,” but there is some belief that has not done better under conditions of remote work.
Meetings are inputs, not outputs. Having more meetings, or spending more time in meetings, does not make firms or organizations more productive. A Microsoft survey of 182 senior managers in a range of industries found support for that thesis.
“65 percent said meetings keep them from completing their own work,” according to Microsoft. “71 percent said meetings are unproductive and inefficient.”
Fully 64 percent said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking while 62 percent said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together (which is sort of a paradox).
Unless directly correlated with output, meetings actually can reduce productivity. Some seem to believe emails are outcomes, when in fact they take away time that might otherwise have been spent actually producing an output.
The point is that we actually can say very little about whether productivity has grown, stayed the same or decreased because of enforced remote work. We could not measure productivity before, so we have no baseline against which to compare, even if we thought we could measure it.
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