A New Definition For Team Productivity
How to escape unfocused busyness and embrace purposeful work
Picture the scene - you meet with one of your friends and after a casual catchup you ask them about work. They roll their eyes and reply: “Busy!”
Many of us seem to experience perpetual busyness. I remember well how my calendar was full with meetings and if there was a gap, it had to be filled with something to ensure I maxed out on my busyness.
But all this came at a price - my own mental health. Being busy felt like the right thing to do - little did I know at the time that I would lead to burnout.
I now firmly believe that we need to have a conversation about what it means to be busy, or more specifically, what it means to be productive.
How do we create value at work? What do I need so I can be productive? What does my team need?
The Busyness Syndrome
I think there is nothing intrinsically bad with being busy. It’s more a question of focus and intent - what are we busy with and to what end?
My experience has been that unhealthy busyness occurs when:
I can’t apply my particular skills and expertise.
I’m unclear about what outcomes I’m aiming for.
I can’t tell whether I and the team are making meaningful progress.
It feels like being in a jungle without a compass and map, whilst having both arms and legs tied together. Very frustrating.
The crazy thing is: Even when everyone is suffering from busyness, your productivity metrics might nonetheless tell you that you and your team are doing well.
How can this be possible?
Consider this: A software engineering team might measure their productivity based on how quickly they can merge pull requests and how many features they can release in a given amount of time.
In this scenario, everyone can be busy with creating output, but collectively the team can fail to create customer value and might burn out at the same time.
We need to look at how busyness translates (or not) into productivity.
Productivity Dimensions
How can we measure our productivity? A common approach is to measure the tasks our team can complete over time, for example by looking at the number of story points. From this it is possible to generalise to the number of features / outputs our team delivers.
Whilst this is a way to demonstrate our productivity, it’s missing two important dimensions: What value are we creating with our tasks and outputs? And how has the impacted on the quality of our team interactions?
Let’s bring all these dimensions together and see how they relate to productivity:
People Interactions: The foundation of our productivity is based on the quality of our interactions. If we work well together, we are more likely to create good solutions.
Task Execution: The efficiency of our task execution will affect how quickly we can do our work. The less distraction and delay, the more productive we are.
Output Quantity: The quantity of outputs is an indicator of how much stuff we can produce. If we struggle to deliver things, we are more likely to be unproductive.
Customer Impact: The impact we have on our customer is a very clear measure of our productivity. When we create value for them, we are most likely creating value for our business.
We can choose how much we focus on each of these dimensions. This can have a significant impact on our productivity.
Traditional Perspective On Productivity
In outlined in The Evolution of Productivity how the understanding of productivity has changed over time. But how we measure productivity often hasn't adapted, ignoring that we don't work on production lines in factories anymore.
In a factory, people create copies of the same product day-in and day-out. Their goal is to increase output whilst maintaining quality and optimising task execution.
In our example above, a software engineering team might focus on the quantity of output they create (how many features they can release in a given amount of time) and how well they can execute necessary tasks (how quickly they can merge pull requests).
When we measure productivity like this, we are heavily indexing on output and task dimensions. This can come to the detriment of the quality of people interactions and lack of focus on customer impact.
What’s Missing?
When a team focusses on improving task execution and increasing output quantity, they are missing a crucial point:
Software engineers are not factory workers - they are creative problem solvers. They don't copy the same product, they deliver new innovative solutions again and again.
In order to be productive, technology teams need to know their customer. Who else can judge whether the solutions they deliver solve their need and are valuable?
For teams to leverage their collective creativity and expertise, they need to be well connected. The quality of interactions within a team makes a significant difference to the quality of solution.
A New Approach
When teams over-index on task execution and output quantity, they can easily neglect building strong team connections and might even fail to deliver customer value.
If you want to significantly increase productivity, then you need to switch your focus to building a psychologically strong team and have a relentless focus on delivering impact for your customers.
This doesn’t mean that efficiency of task execution and output quantity should be ignored altogether, but they should be considered a secondary layer of productivity optimisation.
Productivity Redefined
The traditional approach of measuring productivity can be simplified as “counting the number of tasks or outputs delivered”.
With a renewed focus on the quality of team interactions and clear focus on the customer, this definition feels appropriate:
Teams are productive when they are using their expertise and problem-solving skills efficiently and creatively to impact positive change in relation to their customers' pain points, desires or needs.
Impact on Busyness
This shift from “the amount of stuff we create” to “how well we work together” and “how well we serve our customers” creates a number of immediate benefits:
Mental Health: When the quality of people interactions matter, looking after ourselves and our team members becomes a priority.
Elevating Skills and Expertise: Working well together means to make the most of each team member’s ability to contribute.
Clarity on Purpose and Focus: Understanding your customer and creating impactful solutions create motivation and enables teams to measure what really matters to the business.
With this approach, teams are transforming their busyness: they are able to do less, but what they do, they do well with impact.
So imagine that conversation with your friends again. When they asks about work, you might now reply with a twinkle in your eye: ‘Good busy - thanks’.