Don’t blame the worker

In the past few weeks Mark and Sundar have told their Metamates and Googlers that given threats of a recession, workers need to buckle down. Zuckerberg wants to “[turn] up the heat” and Pichai wants to see “more hunger” from employees. Leaders across the country are likely holding similar “we need to be more productive” conversations — it’s a better alternative to layoffs and hiring freezes, after all.

But how do you handle that conversation delicately, in a way that doesn’t alienate employees? Vaguely gesturing toward the need for workers to be more productive can be at best unhelpful and at worst stressful to the point where they lose all focus.

• You don’t want your productivity pep talk to place blame on workers. Sure, every company has some slackers, but are they the cause of the company’s large-scale financial problems? That’s highly unlikely.
• Timing is everything. It’s easier to identify declining productivity when times are bad, but ideally you shouldn’t have let it get to that point.
• “Individual employees can be mess-ups, and they should be held accountable,” Steve McElfresh, founder of HR Futures, said. “But if it’s at such a level as to affect the fundamental success of the organization, that is not a failure of individual contributors, that is a failure of management.”

Productivity is hard to measure and pinpoint. The metrics are different for every role, and are especially difficult to quantify in software jobs. It’s part of the problem with issuing a productivity ultimatum.

• “People have attempted for many years in the software world to create metrics that can measure individual employee productivity, and they just don’t work,” said David Hanrahan, former CHRO of Eventbrite. “So I'd be immediately suspicious if I heard any software CEO who says, ‘I believe our individual productivity is down.’ Well, how are you measuring that?”
• McElfresh thinks that the only true way to measure productivity is via skilled, personalized managers. Anything else can and will be gamed, he said.
• On the macro level, though, productivity becomes easier to measure. A detailed analysis might reveal you could get the same level of work done with fewer people.

You don’t have to sacrifice flexibility when asking employees to focus on the work. “It’s not an either-or,” said executive coach Mikaela Kiner. “I think sometimes people can confuse flexibility versus accountability and performance.”

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