Productivity in the Modern Office

Companies still struggle to define and measure the productivity of knowledge workers

It was the memo heard around the world: In late February 2013, when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer ordered the company’s staffers to stop working from home, she set off a ferocious debate over workplace productivity.

“Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” wrote the company’s human resources chief in a leaked memo implying that telecommuting employees were less productive than those in the office.

Nonsense, shot back advocates for flexible arrangements: Without interruptions from co-workers or time wasted in traffic, telecommuters are often more productive than their in-office compatriots, not less.

The debate highlights a broader issue that goes well beyond the struggling Silicon Valley giant: the widespread disagreement and lack of clarity over what constitutes productivity in the modern workforce.

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Loyalty vs. Productivity

I did not expect to read such apparently controversial columns on the same QD issue, but, as we all know, reality can be far more odd than fiction. There is a fiction item that keeps being KO'd by reality, and that is definition & measurement: we have become obsessed with definitions & measures, it has become the worst of the capital sins. But we obtusely keep hammering that stone. Will we ever learn? We babble a lot of quality but our definitions and measures keep speaking a quantity language: instead of looking at the quality of a task being done, we give an eye to the watch and the other to the scale. That is, we even measure ourselves in terms of time and - say - pounds weight or height inches. We'll never come out of this vicious circle unless we think of Man in terms of Humanity, instead of production tools. Thank you.