A recent report from “Work In Progress” shows modern companies are getting work and productivity all wrong.<\/p>\n
When did we all get so obsessed with productivity? We see a daily deluge of ads about getting more work done. Software companies say their tools will help customers work faster. We go to workshops and seminars to increase our efficiency.<\/p>\n
But is it actually good for business? And is it really how people want to work?<\/p>\n
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Despite our obsession with moving faster and doing more, productivity growth rates have stalled significantly in the last decade. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we\u2019re only getting\u00a0about 1.4%<\/a>\u00a0more productive per year, the lowest growth rate in 30 years, and the second lowest since the middle of the last century.<\/p>\n We\u2019re producing more productivity tools than ever, but we have less and less to show for it.<\/p>\n Perhaps even more problematic, it turns out a \u201cdo more, faster\u201d mindset isn\u2019t actually how people want to work in the first place.<\/p>\n In a survey of American knowledge workers conducted by Dropbox, 61% say they want to \u201cslow down to get things right,\u201d while only 41%* say they want to \u201cgo fast to achieve more.\u201d<\/p>\n *We asked respondents how much they agreed with each statement separately, which is why the figures don’t add up to exactly 100%.<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n So why are so many companies so focused on increasing productivity at all costs?<\/p>\n One problem is precedent. Traditional industries like manufacturing have concrete ways to measure efficiency. If you can produce more goods over time with fewer resources, you\u2019ve increased your productivity. It\u2019s a mindset that dates back to at least the Industrial Revolution, and it\u2019s a tempting blueprint for any modern-day business.<\/p>\n But the productivity calculus is much murkier when it comes to knowledge work\u2014work that mostly involves dealing with information. Indeed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics\u00a0cautions<\/a>\u00a0that productivity stats \u201cfor nonmanufacturing industries are often difficult to measure\u201d and that \u201ccustomers should be cautious when interpreting the data.\u201d Do more lines of code per hour lead to better products? Would doubling the number of brainstorms per week make designers more creative?<\/p>\n Even in the face of inconclusive data, the desire to do more with less persists\u2014particularly among upper management. At many companies, an IT decision maker or manager picks the team\u2019s tools and sets the working cadence. But for the rank-and-file workers, these tools and timelines can create as many problems as opportunities.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re hiring people for their minds, and then we\u2019re not giving them any space to think.\u201d – Dropbox CEO Drew Houston<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In its 2018 Human Capital Trends report, Deloitte\u00a0found<\/a> that 47% of business and HR leaders were concerned that modern collaboration tools weren\u2019t actually helping businesses achieve their goals. Between chat windows, project management tools, meeting alerts, and emails, workers find themselves in a constant state of reactive busyness\u2014rather than proactively focusing on meaningful work.<\/p>\n Dropbox CEO Drew Houston\u00a0talked about this phenomenon<\/a>\u00a0last fall at Dreamforce. \u201cOur industry has been really good at finding ways to make the treadmill go faster,\u201d he said. “We\u2019re hiring people for their minds, and then we\u2019re not giving them any space to think.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the past couple years, we\u2019ve taken a hard look at what we\u2019re building at Dropbox. Are we simply building to create a sense of efficiency, or are we designing products that help people get the work right? What if we could give people more space to do the best work of their lives, rather than just doing the same work faster?<\/p>\n We\u2019ve been inspired by a few Dropbox customers who are rejecting old models of productivity in favor of new working modes\u2014methods better attuned to the realities of modern work. We\u2019ve seen some organizations\u00a0take a bottom-up mindset<\/a>, looking to employees first for the best tools to use. We\u2019ve noted companies that\u00a0encourage different styles of working<\/a>\u00a0for employees in different countries and cultures, rather than a one-size-fits-all policy.<\/p>\n We\u2019re embracing a similar mindset at Dropbox. We\u2019ve built products like\u00a0Dropbox Paper<\/a>\u2014a workspace that lets teams create and coordinate with less distraction\u2014to reimagine how work happens, with an emphasis not on working faster, but on keeping teams in flow. We\u2019ve given our own employees more space to focus, with Hack Weeks to get people away from email and meetings and focused on the projects they\u2019re most passionate about. (To wit,\u00a0Smart Sync<\/a>\u00a0came out of a company-wide Hack Week).<\/p>\n But to truly design a better way of working, we need to take a closer look at how the workplace is changing. We have to understand how people work, when they work, and why.<\/p>\n Instead of hyper-productivity, which conditions actually lead to people doing their best work?<\/p>\n [\/ihc-hide-content]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A recent report shows modern companies may be getting work […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":21195,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1069,43],"tags":[2035,99,1385,2036,2604,2603,241,172,2602,520],"class_list":["post-21193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editors-choice","category-management-leadership","tag-ben-taylor","tag-ceo","tag-ceo-northam","tag-dropbox","tag-dropbox-article","tag-on-the-clock","tag-productivity","tag-sitting-disease","tag-work-hours","tag-workforce"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21193"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24672,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21193\/revisions\/24672"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.ceo-na.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Captura-de-pantalla-2019-04-29-a-las-17.24.17.png\")
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