Have you ever considered what it means to be productive? Is it:

Dusting some furniture?
Mowing a lawn?
Getting a haircut?
Smoking a cigarette?
Making a coffee?
A video of someone falling over?
Watching an advert?
Making a flyer?
A restaurant meal?
A university degree?
Watching a movie?
Recycling?
Sending flowers?
Writing a fantasy novel?
Playing a 200 hour video game?
Picking up litter?
Getting a suntan on a beach?
Having your car washed (by hand or automatically)?

Or how about office workers:
Setting up a meeting?
Interviewing 5 candidates for a job?
Multi-factor authentication to access a website?
A salesperson phoning up 100 people a day?

Cal Newport states: “productivity refers to the efficiency with which an input is converted into a more valuable output”.

From an accounting or investor perspective we could use Return on Capital Employed (ROCE):

Earnings before Interest and Tax (EBIT) / Capital Employed = ROCE

From an economist perspective, we could look at Labour productivity (the output per unit of labour input) e.g. a worker assembles 8 tables every 8 hour day so the worker’s productivity is 1 table an hour. Also assume the profit on each table is £20 and the worker does 5 days a week.

So Labour Productivity per week is Output (£20x8x5) = £800 divided by hours worked (40) = £20 per hour.

Another approach could be the concept of validated learning from “The Lean Startup” – finding a business model that satisfies customers and is profitable.

My take on this is Productivity is when we create value/happiness/growth and earn a reward for our efforts. The more value we deliver to customers (efficiently), theoretically the higher potential for returns/rewards (or in the case of charitable endeavours, simply the greater our impact).

Nonetheless it is highly subjective and varies per person. For me, I like going to coffee shops, having a pleasant drink and stimulating discussion and leave feeling refreshed. However I could make an instant coffee that is nearly as good at home for a tenth of the price. I wouldn’t have to travel or worry about parking and it would be much quicker.

To put it bluntly I’m wasting time and money… and yet I enjoy it.

Now let’s suppose that instead of a Barista making coffee, you turn up, interact with a touch screen that takes payment and a machine makes your coffee to the same standard. Would you expect it to be cheaper than if a person made it for you? What about if you get an antique that was “hand crafted” over several weeks instead of factory made in a few minutes, but otherwise the item was identical? The problems don’t stop there. This article is not a product of AI, but what if it was?

What about purchasing a near identical copy of the Mona Lisa (made by an equally talented artist or AI)? Is it of the same value? If not, why not?

However to invert the argument, what about an AI that designs a superior medicine than a human could or performs surgery to a higher standard?

The answer seems to be: There’s a premium to quality / insight / growth / originality / scarcity / skills.

So Productivity is about innovation. We venerate Newton, but a student learning about gravity, less so. A graffiti artist might be treated as a criminal and the offending paint cleaned off, but were someone to scrub off a Banksy, people might call it an act of vandalism.

Another form of Productivity is a service (that elevates our Productivity). For example a faster web connection or flight, or pre-assembled flat-pack furniture.

In an early job, one of my tasks was to issue refunds manually every day because the company was figuring out how to automate it. Eventually the task was automated (I did some browser automation my end to speed it up, but the backend IT team figured out a more robust solution). At other times I’ve done manual building/testing of websites/apps and manual account creation/removal. Such websites might exist for a few years (or in one case, get shutdown shortly after launch), before they are redesigned or moved over to a new platform.

Now I got paid for doing those activities and they (mostly) contributed towards profitability, but in hindsight, they were of limited long-term value.

Consider also should items have built in obsolescence (wasting the manufacturers’ effort, harming the customer and damaging the brand) or be repairable (potentially stifling innovation and sales because people won’t be buying new equipment)? Do we need so many banks offering current accounts with limited differentiation or so many car companies building similar models?

The market (you and I) assign a value to work, however as Ben Horowitz has said “markets aren’t efficient…they just converge on a conclusion, often the wrong conclusion”. For example William Blake was poor during much of his lifetime, but his posthumous reputation is of a strong poet/artist, highlighting the importance of marketing/advocating for the value you provide.

I’d also like you to consider speed of production. Returning to the coffee shop example, a worker (or machine) that makes coffees to a higher standard faster or for longer hours than others is more Productive. Similarly a worker who is paid/charges less for the same work can be said to be more valuable to the company/customer.

A lot of the world works this way today. Clothes, electricals and other goods are manufactured in lower labour cost nations and exported to wealthier countries. Similarly younger workers are often hired to do lower skilled work and are paid less per hour but may work longer.

However doing the same rote work at speed for low wages is not the full picture. It sounds like Productivity, but like seeking “Faster horses”, eventually those who out-innovate will lead.

So Productivity is about both Innovation and Efficiency.

The remainder of this article will focus on pragmatic steps for achieving high productivity.

There are two levels I’d like to consider:

1) The worker at the coal face completing logistical style problems.

2) The entrepreneur/CEO leading a business.

1) For a worker:

When someone is employed to do a job (for example compiling reports in Excel to be emailed), you can look at ways of speeding this up through process improvement/refinement and upskilling.

Initially you might think the way you were trained to do it is optimal and focus on clicking faster. Indeed Zappos observed getting 1% better each day could result in a 37x improvement at the end of the year.

However in “How Google Works” Schmidt/Rosenberg/Eagle introduce the concept of thinking 10X or ten times the current situation “10Xing” a job.

So a 10% improvement could be having the shortcut to Excel or your file in a prominent place on your taskbar/desktop, or perhaps buying a faster computer or using multiple monitors (or equivalent tool). Do enough of these, and you’ll be flying along.

However 10X encourages us to look differently. Firstly who uses the reports/what value do they derive from them? Look at understanding the requirements of the report recipients and then design your process around giving that information, potentially redesigning the reports to convey the important information more quickly or more clearly or even eliminate upstream (where the data comes from) or downstream (modifications the recipients apply to the data) steps.

Having established requirements, you could map out the steps/processes of the work conducted on a regular basis in checklist format and then look for opportunities to speed up/streamline each stage of the work. Andy Grove in High Output Management explains this is called “Work Simplification” or “Job Simplification”.

Stretching the Excel example a bit further, you could build a reusable template with multiple sheets (perhaps the first one is where the data goes and functions generate the information on other sheets/tabs) or look at using VBA to automate more of the process such as sending an email with an Excel attachment, greatly reducing or eliminating your manual efforts, periodically sanity checking the reports are still being generated correctly.

Also think about the skills you’ll learn yourself to do your job better/more effectively and what training you will deliver to your colleagues and bosses to help them achieve as well. Don’t rely solely on your employer to do this – you should pro-actively look to grow constantly and keep informed about your industry. As Grove writes “Are you trying new ideas, new techniques and new technology [personally]… or are you waiting for others to figure out how they can re-engineer your workplace – and you out of that workplace.”

Thus by using some thought, you can improve productivity and switch from focussing on busyness to “solving a problem once” as a former boss of mine once said.

Of course 10X can often take a long time to learn/effort to implement and sometimes these efforts to speed up simply don’t work, become overly complex or take longer than expected. In such cases, you have to decide whether the cost-benefit reward is worth the time or whether to delegate to a different employee (perhaps someone more junior or a teammate with skills who can improve delivery).

Of course if we want to be truly productive, we should start by looking behind the job description to the business case for our jobs to identify/work on the high value activities.

Say for example you are a website tester as I have been. Where might the value lie? Well if we’re talking about Ecommerce, if the site goes down, the prices are wrong or people can’t make purchases, we’ve got a problem. On the other hand, if a low traffic page has a slight typo, this is probably not the end of the world.

A P1 for a warehouse (told to me by a former colleague) might be “the automatic label machine put two address labels on a package by accident and all subsequent parcels sent out to customers went to the wrong places”.

The business case for an Ecommerce company might be we want to sell/fulfil lots of desirable goods to lots of satisfied customers and achieve a healthy profit. So being productive are endeavours that support this including marketing to drive traffic (offline, SEO, PPC advertising and so on), quality assurance, high availability/uptime, optimising conversion rates on product pages, improving product quality, reducing costs, improving delivery times, quickly resolving customer service issues, having a wide selection of products, simplifying/speeding up the purchase process, competitive pricing and so on. Jeff Bezos famously said of Amazon when someone questioned him on why he should allow (negative) product reviews he said “We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”

Additionally Bezos understood that if people trust Amazon, they’ll be inclined to shop the first time and again and again in future.

The Pareto Principle talks of how 80% of the consequences come from 20% of causes and in The Dip by Godin he refers to Zipf’s law and highlights using the example of the popularity of Ice Cream (Vanilla takes most of the market share, followed by others at much smaller long-tail percentages like chocolate or strawberry) that there’s a premium to being the best in your field.

Thus you should seek to identify your top 20% priorities by understanding your company and figuring out the value your role provides and look at how to maximise this and grow the business and yourself.

2) Entrepreneurs/CEOs:

In “Working Backwards” Byrar and Carr talk about Amazon’s fly wheel that increases/accelerates growth.

Traffic > Sellers > Selection > Lower Cost Structure > Lower Prices > Customer Experience > Traffic and so on all contributes to greater growth/sales.

You should create your own flywheel.

One time I worked for a publisher on their brand websites and we tried promotions such as registering giving a set number of free articles/offering a free trial to generate engagement and hopefully at the end a new subscriber. With technology, the cost of offering this is relatively cheap and obtaining a potential customer’s email address is most likely worth the handful of free content they get.

The Publisher’s web business priority could be defined as engaging new and existing subscribers with rare, high quality, authoritative and accessible content released before other sources to raise the profile of the Brands and command a premium subscription price for individuals and business customers. Additionally engaged users would also benefit from attending industry events/awards and seeing relevant ads.

More than this though, the reason people visited the websites was to grow themselves, so a good metric would be “How does reading this content contribute to the success of the visitor’s career/business/life outcomes?”

I’m sure you can come up with similar examples for other businesses.

To recap from earlier Productivity is also about delivering your offering efficiently to a high improving standard. For example Google recognises the value of speed to the user. When you do a Google search there are suggestions and when you submit the search, the time taken to return the results has been optimised. Their browser, Chrome, was launched with a focus on making web browsing faster. They also developed tools to help webmasters optimise sites to be leaner/load faster and developed the webp image format that is smaller, again to allow faster downloads.

Why? In addition to user loyalty/success, according to Think with Google (https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/future-of-marketing/digital-transformation/the-google-gospel-of-speed-urs-hoelzle/) “A 400ms delay leads to a 0.44 percent drop in search volume” that would translate to fewer ad impressions/clicks and harm the business.

Another area is staff costs. Imagine for a moment, every day it takes 2 minutes for staff to log in and get to the websites/programs they need to work. Suppose you hire 50 staff. That delay is costing you 100 minutes per day, or, over circa 260 working days (less annual leave), 26000 minutes or 433 hours or 54 days 8 hour days.

What about a slow lift in an office? 30 second delay per staff member, per time of use – say 4 times a day. 2 minutes gone. Another 54 days.

What about a slow coffee machine or kettle that takes 1 min longer to make a coffee than a hot water tap, assuming 4 cups a day, 4 mins, or 108 days.

What about staff receiving unnecessary emails? Let’s say 4 a day, taking 2 minutes (54 days). What about giving someone an ambiguous task with incomplete information and them having to ask follow-up questions or someone waiting for a decision? What about someone juggling too many competing priorities/work items and doing lots of context switching? What about staff having lengthy, unpredictable commutes? What about staff having to go a long way for lunch? What about lengthy procurement/accounts payable processes? What about a delay taking payments from customers? What about your staff doing manual work because they lack the tools or skills to automate processes your competitors have already implemented?

I mean the list goes on, but here’s the problem – all these little things add up to “cause fatal delays” to borrow from Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business when there are no easy answers) and most of the examples above are relatively passive e.g. they’re not conscious choices by the staff to take a break from tiredness which is a different conversation, they’re instead just holding back their potential.

Another area to consider is an employee unsure what the priorities are (and why) or kept as a small cog with no visibility of the wider mission may do well, but they essentially will be living in an artificial bubble. This is essentially an act of harm to the worker and to your business.

In Turn the Ship Around, Marquet talks about “leader leader” – so (and I’m paraphrasing) the notion that rather than one person (the Captain) doing all the thinking on a nuclear submarine, instead all the staff are engaged/thinking at the highest level and all the Captain has to say after being presented with the subordinates intended action is “very well”.

Getting your staff thinking like adults is difficult. It is easy to say “here’s a checkout, here’s a target, off you go for the next 4 hours”.

Here’s an odd thought though – when I use my local supermarket’s served checkouts, they have to manually enter the barcodes of oversized items because the barcode scanner is too small/the barcodes are in the wrong place on some packaging. The frontline staff are aware of it, but the problem persists.

Moreover I went to the Excel centre (London) and entered a shop using Amazon technology where you put your payment card on a reader and a gate opens. You pick up the items you want from the shelves or fridges (tracked by cameras) and walk out through an exit gate, whereupon your card is charged, significantly reducing the time spent unpacking/repacking shopping. This suggests the checkout workers’ jobs could be disrupted when the technology becomes more widespread / affordable / accurate / capable.

So what can be done?

Those staff could be learning skills such as Logistics, Customer Service, IT, AI, Store Management and so on. Rather than the technology disrupting their jobs (the child mindset), they should be advocating for it (the leader/owner mindset) and thinking about how to make the customer happier and their store/wider business more successful.

Treating an employee like an adult means listening to them, empowering them, loving them, challenging them to be great and preparing them for success whether at your business or elsewhere.

This means everyone from the cleaner to the CEO should be focussed on delivering value for the business.

“The cleaner?” I hear you say. A cleaner who is responsible and empowered can order a new vacuum or better cleaning product and be proud of their work. They can choose where they focus their time and advise on keeping those cables safe. When a customer needs help or a member of staff loses their pass or someone gets lost, they step up. They are on the ball. Moreover Andy Grove talked about middle managers and know-how managers being “Micro CEOs”, but I’d argue the term extends to every person and every job.

Also a company that treats the cleaners right and has a clean and tidy office/factory/store sets the tone for the culture. So yes, even/especially the cleaner should be treated like an adult.

However whilst staff should have some autonomy, a hotel where the cleaner doesn’t get their core job done and rooms aren’t ready in time would potentially jeopardize the reputation of the hotel.

Horowitz talks about Peacetime CEOs vs Wartime CEOs and my takeaway was in Peacetime a CEO encourages individuality from staff and an expansionist mindset, whereas the Wartime CEO is hyper-focussed on survival and getting specific work done.

In my opinion, running an operation entirely in one of those styles is flawed. A leader who says to the cleaner “you’re free to do whatever you want” is probably going to end up with hotel rooms not ready. However a leader who says “every room must be done on time or you’re fired” is probably going to find the staff unhappy, disengaged, prone to burnout and doing the minimum to meet that standard.

I suppose you’ll say to me “the second approach is best”, but actually no. Really what you want is a hybrid where the staff achieve the essential requirements, but also orientate towards growth, deliver sustained high performance and find joy in their roles.

A hotel cleaner could say “hey look I’ve found this way of servicing the rooms quicker, I took this course and other hotels follow this best practice, this room has a broken switch, this laundry detergent works better, this customer has some feedback, or, if we’re informed of the rooms empty earlier we can get them ready sooner so people can check in earlier.”

This brings us to the concept of psychological safety. Staff should be challenged and engaged with the mission, however also know that the company has their back if they make a mistake, spot wrongdoing, get overloaded, fall ill or the popular maxim it is ok to fail when pursing growth. Such cultures can lead to amazing productivity.

In an environment where mistakes are punished, the incentive is to keep quiet, hide bad news and optimise for safety. Horowitz: “If you investigate companies that have failed, you will find that many employees knew about the fatal issues long before those issues killed the company”…“the company culture discouraged the spread of bad news, so the knowledge lay dormant until it was too late to act. A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news.” The other incentive is: “visible busyness as a proxy for actual productivity” (Newport).

Let’s turn to Objectives and key results, and metrics. When a business and an employee sets their Objectives, it is tempting to play safe and include ones that are easily accomplished “I will attend mandatory training”. At the other extreme “I will triple business sales next quarter through organic SEO”. It comes back to Psychological safety. An employee who feels safe and engaged can set themselves very stretching Objectives, knowing their efforts towards the targets will be appreciated, even in the event they don’t meet them.

Also you may have heard about setting “SMART” Objectives, however I’ve found these rarely correlate with reality and often aren’t that helpful after all.

To say “I will sell 1000 units in 6 months” is a target, but why not say “I will attempt to sell a reasonable amount of units for as long as I’m employed here”. Do you think the first is better – I don’t. I think the first is probably a pleasing lie. People who say “I will do x” are assuming in the moment they won’t be struck dead by lightning.

So let’s talk about what Newport/4DX describe as Lead and Lag indicators.

A Lead measure is something we have some control over in the moment, for example “I will research and contact 10 prospects today.”

Newport for example tracks the metric of how many “Deep work (focussed) hours” he achieves in a day.

A Lag measure is in the past (sales, customer satisfaction scores, Project progress and so on).

So suddenly we’ve gone from a blatant lie (we most likely can’t control whether someone buys a unit) to something we can measure/control (number of prospects contacted).

However again we hit a problem. A manager insisting on “contact 10 prospects a day” is also causing problems because if I’m a reasonably competent salesperson I can work out for myself how to spend my day – I might only contact 1 prospect, but they might buy 100 units.

What can be done? First off OKRs must be agreed between a manager and an employee so it’s understood, achievable, useful to the business/wider mission and owned by the employee. To say “My sales target is to sell >1000 units in the next six months, and this will be supported by me researching and contacting at least 100 prospects and adding them to our system, preparing 12 pages of sales material/information to be shared online/via email/via post (2 pages a month) to my network. We’ll track engagement/open/conversion rates digitally with a target conversion of 10% of those who read the material (circa 10 people reaching out to buy from me directly.))”

Suddenly that OKR has come alive and lets an employee fly. However it ignores wider business profitability and encourages a self-centred approach. Consider therefore supplementing with an additional Objective “The business should achieve revenue of £5 million and I will support this by delivering three training sessions on best practice to more junior staff in Sales to support them achieving 500 unit sales each, arrange a meeting with the CEO and sales leadership to agree the optimal pricing strategy for profitability and setup an exit survey to understand why we lose existing customers and contact those who left due to being dissatisfied to see whether they can be re-engaged.”

Again, it is about things the employee can do, rather than things outside their control. You will probably have your own ideas here, and that’s good.

Another 4DX principle to consider is: “Keep a compelling scorecard”.

The idea is to track your metrics – in High Output Management Grove suggests using a stagger chart/forecast for sales, but it could be used for most metrics.

For example the Forecast vs Actual below (numbers/dates are just examples):

Forecast made in	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
Jan	10	11	12	11
Feb		10	12	11	11
Mar			11	10	11	12
Apr				10	11	12	10
May					10	12	11	10
Jun						11	10	12	11
Jul							10	11	12	11
Aug								11	11	12	11
Sep									10	11	11	12
Oct										11	10	11
Nov											10	11
Dec												11

Other potential metrics we could use include Project Goals/milestones achieved, SLA performance, Bugs, Deep Work hours or Cycle Time.

Grove also talked about pairing indicators with one for Output and one for Quality e.g. a Cleaner could be assessed on square feet cleaned plus someone could rate the cleanliness of an area. In an Engineering team, Cycle time could be coupled with number of bugs found as I’ve seen done.

Before we continue though – what is “Cycle Time”? It is the time between work starting (In Progress) to work completed (Done). It is different from “Lead time” (the total length of time from a work item (or Issue) being created to closed). Average Cycle Time can be tracked in Jira’s Control Chart report for a saved board (filter) or Actionable Agile.

This can serve as a challenge/gamification of work for your teams to achieve a better score. It works best when you trust your staff and build an honest culture as it can be manipulated. For example a sure fire way to achieve a faster Cycle Time is to cut the work required in each Issue, reduce/eliminate time for the reporters to confirm they are happy, introduce technical debt by rushing and so on. Similarly in Scrum Story Points are used to estimate the size of a piece of work and whilst a team that completes a high Story Point total each Sprint can be said to be improving, the number can also be inflated. Hence I caution against so called “Management by numbers” as per Ben Horowitz who likens it to “painting by numbers – strictly for amateurs”.

I can also think of a number of ways CEOs can maximise short term profit metric vs doing the right thing – selling Stores and renting them back, cutting the number of Customer Service agents or not spending on R&D.

However metrics do contribute to our understanding of a business and productivity and therefore this technique may help.

4DX also advocates for having a regular cadence of accountability such as a daily stand-up where the team members talk about what they’ve achieved yesterday/are working on today and reviewing their metrics.

Finally lets talk about another 4DX principal – Focus on the wildly important.

One of the biggest wastes of all in business is having people work on things that don’t add value such as a product that never launches, office politics, excessive administrative overheads and so on, but how do you know what is important? To go back to where we began “The Lean Startup” provides an answer – Ries states what matters is learning at speed what the customer wants/what works/is valuable.

Therefore for an entrepreneur productivity is about pushing for such learning and orienting the time businesses/workers spend towards high value activities and having “internal startup teams” even in big companies. In one job I worked, a team decided to use their own budget to come up with a professional development training website for their customers. They did it autonomously and got it launched. Was it perfect? No. However they showed real initiative and were rightly recognised by the business.

Yes it can be difficult to quantify a staff member using their initiative to try something new (e.g. spending time on a new product idea or a faster way of doing something) – is it waste or is the potential growth worth the time investment? Hard to say I know, but this is the challenge of entrepreneurship.