Productivity theater is hard to kill

Work about work is a waste of time, but even forward-thinking companies accidently encourage it.

There’s a disconnect between how much time we spend working and how much we’re getting done. And productivity theater accounts for that rift. 

Productivity is falling at its fastest rate in four decades. This shouldn’t be happening. We have AI, infinite productivity-centered SaaS products, low-meeting work cultures, no commute, no in-office banter, etc.

Both managers and individual contributors share the blame. ICs feel pressure to perform productivity theater, or to prove that they’re working. The more ICs and mid-level managers engage in productivity theater, the more pressure other workers feel to participate. Whole company cultures are built this way.

Managers — even great ones — incentivize employees to show off their efforts over their impact. They reward dense documentation, full calendars, long Slack threads, etc. These are all things that help real work get done. But they don’t drive meaningful bottom-line impact.

Companies need to squash productivity theater. It’ll be a win for everybody. Less stress for employees, more value-added output, less micromanaging for supervisors. But it’s a lot harder to weed out than it appears. 

The problem of knowledge management systems

We all know meetings are bad. At forward-thinking companies, meetings have largely been supplanted by documentation.

But the internal wiki is also a huge problem. This is an area where a low-meeting, high-documentation work culture isn’t enough to curb the bullshit of productivity theater.

Documentation is really helpful for scaling a team, reducing Slack pings, and avoiding meetings. And documenting everything in Notion or Confluence makes it easy for everybody across the company to access any information they might need. 

But it can also be a total mess. 

The collusive audience

Knowledge management systems like Notion, Sharepoint, Confluence, etc. ushered in a new era of productivity theater: one in which creating and consuming documentation replaces valuable output. 

The goal of a Notion wiki or a Confluence page is to increase intellectual capital. Knowledge is a resource, and sharing knowledge makes everyone better at their jobs. 

But in the wrong hands, knowledge management systems can wind up becoming a surveillance tool for managers and an outlet for productivity theater for employees. 

That’s because documentation has more than one rhetorical function. It teaches people something, yes, but it also serves as proof that you’re actually doing something with your day. 

When you create a Notion doc, there are two audiences:

• Your peers

• Your supervisor

Your peers are looking to learn more about your idea or see the steps you took to accomplish something, depending on what your doc is about. 

Your manager is trying to get a sense for your idea, too. But they’re also looking to see that you’re getting work done.

In rhetoric, they call this the collusive audience. The collusive audience is a person or group of people who are picking up on a subtext, a wink of knowing, or some kind of doublespeak in your message. In this case the subtext is: Don’t worry. I’m working. 

Managers are a collusive audience for the employees creating documentation for the sake of appearing productive.

Both managers and individual contributors aid and abet in this deceptive dance. The real audience for frivolous documentation isn’t other teammates – though it will waste their time – it’s managers and supervisors also filling their day with low-value tasks. 

The tower of Babel

Frequently, workers are creating redundant documentation in knowledge management systems that don’t actually increase intellectual capital. 

This redundant documentation isn’t just a waste of time for the people writing it. It’s also a waste of time for the people consuming it. 

There are a bunch of reasons why people create redundant documentation. Maybe docs are siloed by department. Perhaps people in marketing don’t realize someone in product already wrote up a brief on a common topic. 

Maybe documentation nomenclature is vague, so people struggle to find the doc they need and assume they need to create a new one. Or maybe people just aren’t actually reading the documentation that exists. 

Regardless of the cause, redundant and siloed documentation transforms the company wiki into a disordered tower of Babel. Too many people talking, too few speaking the same language. 

Siloed and repetitive docs reduce the efficacy and efficiency of the entire knowledge management system, cluttering Notion and Sharepoint with a bunch of information that isn’t actually helpful or necessary. 

By extension, this leads to a devaluation of all intellectual capital at the company. Clutter isn’t useful. Knowing what not to include in Notion is just as important as knowing what to include. 

Okay, so now what

The answer to productivity theater is so simple as to be cliche.

Focus on impact over effort.

That doesn’t mean you should fire your marketing team the first time they miss their pipeline goal. It means you should reward people for increasing revenue, closing deals, shipping features, diagnosing issues, fixing issues, increasing customer satisfaction, extending contracts, driving traffic, etc., rather than rewarding them for how much work they put on their manager’s desk.

The question managers need to answer is this:

What are you afraid of?

It would appear most executives are essentially afraid employees are stealing company money. Especially in a remote environment, people want to know their employees are working, or they’ll feel scammed. It’s human nature to get defensive and panicky about being cheated.

But the theory that all of your employees are lazy scammers is:

1. Not aligned with reality 99% of the time.

2. Can lead to a culture that promotes productivity theater. And that degrades real productivity by orders of magnitude.

If your employees are sitting around not working or devoting cognitive effort to solving the daily problems of your organization, you’ll find out. Numbers will change in a bad way. But if they don’t, and your employees have figured out a way to do less and achieve more, who cares? All that matters is that the business is growing. Once you lose sight of that, you’re distracted.

Truly focusing on impact over effort requires an immense amount of trust and restraint. It requires a generous temperament that assumes the people you hired are good for their word. And it requires a confrontation with your secret insecurities as a leader. But this self-examination may be what stands between you and a team of 10x employees.