Are Meetings and Messages Really "Work" or "Outcomes?"

There is some evidence that workers and their managers do not agree on the impact of remote work on productivity. A Microsoft survey of 20,000 people in 11 countries found 87 percent of employees reporting they are more productive remotely or with a mix of in-office and remote work. 

But 85 percent of leaders say hybrid work makes it difficult to determine if their workers are being productive.

We should be clear that nobody has yet developed an accepted and trustworthy way of measuring knowledge worker or office worker productivity. 

So the debate about the productivity of remote work will likely never be fully settled, in large part because it is so difficult, perhaps impossible, to measure knowledge worker or office worker productivity. 

Whether knowledge worker productivity is up, down or flat is almost impossible to say, despite claims one way or the other. Much of the debate rests on subjective reports by remote workers themselves, not “more-objective” measures, assuming one could devise such measures. 

Pearson's Law and the Hawthorne Effect  illustrate the concept that people who know they are being measured will perform better than they would if they are not being measured. 

Pearson's Law states that “when performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates.” In other words, productivity metrics improve when people know they are being measured, and even more when people know the results are reported to managers. 

Performance feedback is similar to the Hawthorne Effect. Increased attention from experimenters tends to boost performance. In the short term, that could lead to an improvement in productivity.

In other words, “what you measure will improve,” at least in the short term. It is impossible to know whether productivity--assuming you can measure it--actually will remain better over time, once the near term tests subside. 

So we are only dealing with opinions: whether those of workers or their managers. People might think they are productive, when they are not. Managers might believe some set of tools allows them to measure such productivity, when they actually cannot. 

Let us be truthful: people like working remotely for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with “productivity” in a direct sense. Managers distrust such work modes in part because they lose what they believe to be impressionistic measures of input. 

But input does not matter. Output matters. And “output” is difficult to measure in any knowledge or office work, in ways that correlate well with organizational outputs. 

And by some quantitative measures, remote work might be reducing productivity, using either time spent on communication--whether by messaging or in meetings. Some people act as though sending messages constitutes work, when it might be, at best, a way to coordinate work. 

Some seem to believe that meetings are work, when most meetings are efforts to coordinate work. “Work” happens outside chats, messages or meetings. So if time in meetings or spent communicating increases, that increases the “time spent” denominator for purposes of determining outcomes numerators. 

In other words, if remote work creates a need for vastly-more communication about work, then the effort to produce outcomes from work almost certainly increases, compared to output. Hence, lower productivity.

“Since February 2020, the average Teams user saw a 252 percent increase in their weekly meeting time and the number of weekly meetings has increased 153 percent,” says Microsoft.

The average Teams user sent 32 percent more chats each week in February 2022 compared to March 2020 and that figure continues to climb. Workday span for the average Teams user has increased more than 13 percent (46 minutes) since March 2020, and after-hours and weekend work has grown even more quickly, at 28 percent and 14 percent, respectively.

source: Microsoft 

It might only be one indicator, but vastly-increased time spent on coordination might be a sign that remote work is not as “productive” as remote workers believe, unless the amount of work time increases to compensate. And even there, increasing the denominator, compared to the numerator, always leads to a smaller result: arguably lower productivity.