Lost Productivity: Is the Culprit Social Media or Sloppy Communication?

Productivity is a big deal – the idea is to produce good hourly output at work, especially if you want to get a raise. An article (Why Your Facebook Habit At Work Makes Economists Worry) says that some people want to blame employees who are using social media for the recent drop in productivity. Another theory is that employers aren’t investing in better tools for their personnel. The reason for this is that “there aren’t any game-changing innovations to invest in”.

Seriously? Has anybody noticed that people don’t communicate productively? Recent examples in organizations I’ve been working with:

• A company policy makes it clear that performance reviews must be updated annually. But in a brief survey of managers asked about performance evaluations, over 60% of them said, “We don’t really do many performance reviews here.” So, you don’t pay regular attention to productivity?
• Sharon, a new manager, used a long weekend to map out the job responsibilities of her 14 staff members. She spelled out the details, put each “assignment” into a separate document, and emailed it to her people. When they arrived at work on Monday morning, they saw their updated job descriptions in their in-boxes. One of them said to me, “She didn’t even talk to us about this. Some of these tasks are outdated, and she left out other really important things we need to do. This is just stupid.” A lost weekend, and probably some lost trust too.
• Robin asked Ted to pull together an RFP to get people who will help integrate and upgrade their auditing software. Five days later, Robin asks Ted if it’s done yet. Ted says, “You never said when you wanted it, so I haven’t even started. What is your deadline?” Five days misspent?

Communications that lack follow-through, or don’t include a dialogue with relevant parties, or fail to include timelines for assignments, will be ineffective. It impaired productivity in all three of these cases, and over a long career I have seen many more instances of such bumbling.

What about helping employees learn to communicate more effectively? Like, how to follow through on policy implementation to support people keeping up with corporate commitments. Or how to have a dialogue with other human beings about what is wanted and needed to update their job descriptions.Or how to practice adding “by when” to your requests.

The article ends with something that makes a lot of sense. A long-term answer to boosting productivity is (…drum roll please) better educated workers. I couldn’t agree more.