Why 'busy' is not the same as 'productive'.

Even before this recent disruption, I was able to work a few days a week from home. My team and the teams I work closely with are distributed over a wide geographical area, so adapting to full remote working has not been too much of a culture shock for me. I know that for a lot of friends and colleagues, though, the change has taken some adjustment. I also know that a number of organisations for whom the idea of ‘working from home’ was previously verboten have had to very rapidly accept and adapt to this new normal.

What many of the people in those organisations have said to me is that after a small period of adjustment, they are mostly now able to do what they could from within the office environment, which is a fantastic testament to the advances in technology over the last decade. Can you image what working from home would have been like ten or 15 years ago?

But what really strikes me is that almost everyone I speak to is so busy. It’s the word that everyone uses: busy. I’m so busy. I have so many things to do. It never stops.

And it made me wonder this weekend: is being busy at work good? Busy, after all, is just a description of having a lot to do – it doesn’t mean that what is being done is valuable or productive. Being busy can mean more stress, less time to focus on quality, less ability to think strategically – so is this current state of permanent ‘busyness’ a good or bad thing?

Part of the confusion I believe comes from the conflation of ‘busy’ with ‘productive’. Now, I’m not suggesting that people say “I’ve been very productive” when you ask how they are, but I do think that in a world of remote working, Zoom / Teams calls and geographically disconnected teams we should look at what ‘busy’ means. Does ‘busy’ mean productive, or does it mean doing busywork?

There is also a cultural element: being busy is part of the currency of our time. Busy is equated to having a wide range of responsibility, and not being busy can be seen as either a mark laziness or a sign of redundancy or obsolescence. The current situation is importantly different from whatever counts as ‘normal’, because it is a relatively short, sharp shock. For most of the people I have spoken with, their jobs haven’t radically changed since lockdown began, just the way that they do them. So what may be making everyone so busy? I have identified four potential reasons:

• There’s more to do. This should be obvious and I make no effort to disguise it – we are dealing with an unprecedented situation, and as such more may be asked of us. There are also increased demands from home and out-of-work priorities. We all need to step up, balance more work and deliver even greater value.
• How we work is inefficient. Work has a natural flow. The processes and systems, the channels we communicate through, and the tools we rely upon all exist in a web that we navigate daily to deliver value. But those systems may simply not be fit for purpose today. If you’re having to send five emails over five days because a system is not getting you an answer to a question that was previously resolved with a walk down a corridor and a conversation, you’ll naturally struggle when that corridor is closed. Never has the need for digitally-enabled operations been so clearly highlighted.
• Work runs on communication. Morning stand-ups. Water cooler conversations. You’ll have your own ways of staying abreast of the latest news. Or, you had your own ways – remote working means that communication has to change. Spending an hour on a call with three teammates and your manager for two minutes of relevant information that won’t be shared another way is inefficient and unproductive – even if you try to work in the background. Leaders and managers need to consistently communicate relevant, timely information to their direct reports and the same information flow needs to work in the reverse, going up the chain at the right times. Time spent receiving relevant information is not wasted. Time spent listening to unnecessary or duplicated detail is.
• Productivity crashes on bad communication. Where time spent inefficiently receiving information is a drain on execution bandwidth, missing or late direction and poor or unclear decision-making authority leads to unnecessary effort and corrective action. Fixing a problem draws effort away from focussing on right-first-time delivery and can create a cycle of additional burden. Unfortunately, rework tends to spiral when communication is unclear, leading to worse communication and more rework, and it doesn’t take much for this to impact culture.

You may not be experiencing any of these characteristics, or you may have all of them to a more or lesser extent, but what we will all see is an amplification of issues that already existed. Gaps in communication, disconnected manual systems, confused decision making and inefficient processes will all have existed before this change in working environment, and we are just seeing the consequences in a greater light. The hope should be that now that they’re thrown into relief there will be a more focussed effort to change them, and that ‘busy’ will simply be a positive sign of an engaged, informed, productive workplace.