The Illusion of Productivity: Your Busiest Teams May Be Your Worst Performers
Why focusing on results—not activity—creates better organizations and more equitable workplaces
Most companies suck at measuring goals and outcomes-based management.
If there's one transformation that can simultaneously improve organizational performance and create a more level playing field for people from different backgrounds, it's shifting away from monitoring and visual signs of activity toward outcomes-based management.
The business world isn't short on goal-setting frameworks—MBOs, KPIs, OKRs, (even V2MOMs) —yet most organizations struggle with three foundational elements: setting meaningful goals and priorities, measuring progress at the team level, and holding people accountable for performance.
In the past year alone, I've worked on my own and alongside BCG with enterprises grappling with alignment issues, leaders concerned their managers aren't driving hard enough on performance, and organizations unable to move beyond monitoring as their default management approach.
The Monitoring Trap
You can see the challenge everywhere. Return-to-office mandates often stem from executives' anxiety about "whether people are really working." This concern is unfortunate but understandable: too many managers only know how to assess performance based on whether they can physically see someone working – a huge challenge when 86% of firms have distributed teams.
In a recent study, 70% of executives said their primary way of measuring productivity was activity: when do people log in, are the physically present, hours on keyboards. The costs of this approach are steep:
Wasted productivity: According to Slack research, employees spend 32% of their time "on performative work that gives the appearance of productivity"
Heightened stress: 49% of monitored employees report high anxiety levels, compared to just 7% of those not monitored. Anxiety does not create good business results.
Misplaced priorities: Atlassian found 65% of people felt it was more important to read notifications than focus on their core work.
All of this productivity theater: Sound and fury, signifying nothing. Stewart Butterfield, Slack's co-founder, called much of what results "Hyper-Realistic Work-Like Activity"—days filled with meetings and quick email responses that create the illusion of productivity without driving results.
Beyond Productivity Theater
The shift to outcomes-based management isn't just about flexible work policies—it's what enabled Synchrony Financial's CEO to embrace hybrid work confidently and drove Neiman Marcus Group's remarkable performance turnaround. It's also the missing link for organizations trying to capture value from generative AI: without clear business outcomes, your "secret cyborgs" keep the productivity gains to themselves.
Similarly, the traditional annual performance review has become nearly obsolete. What should be a thoughtful assessment of progress and potential is typically a recency-biased, stress-inducing process that satisfies HR systems but adds minimal value.
Regular quarterly conversations where managers and employees align on clear goals—both results and professional development—offer a far better alternative. And require a lot of work across the board to enable.
Learning From Experience
I've wrestled with this transition myself as a leader at organizations of all sizes:
As a startup CEO, clarity around goals, objectives, and priorities wasn't just important—it was existential. Ambiguity wasn't an option when survival was at stake. We invested in clear priorities, quarterly goal setting, monthly assessments and clear accountability paired with responsibility.
At Google, I inherited the OKR system and saw both its strengths and limitations. When I became General Manager of a cross-functional business unit, I discovered a critical challenge: engineering teams, where achieving 80% of goals was considered success, struggled to align with sales teams, where anything below 100% of quota meant failure.
At Slack, our evolution was telling. In the early high-growth days, metrics were straightforward and some sloppiness didn't hurt the top line. As the business grew more complex, the need for clear, measurable goals became imperative. Product teams juggling multiple objectives and marketing serving diverse needs required greater clarity. The hardest part wasn’t setting goals or building good yardsticks—it was crystallizing true priorities and maintaining focus on the top organizational objectives.
The Path Forward
Whether you're navigating hybrid work models or seeking to leverage generative AI, you won't succeed without shifting to outcomes-based management: clear goals, measures of progress and transparency of progress are the common denominator among companies thriving in both arenas.
Creating this shift requires difficult decisions. Clear goals and strategies tell people not just what to work on, but what to stop working on. They demand betting on what's most important and committing long enough to see results.
The payoff is transformational—not just for your bottom line, but for your teams. You drive organizational performance while simultaneously creating a more level playing field for people from diverse backgrounds. You move from "Johnny shows up early and stays late, so he deserves promotion" to "Look at what Johnny accomplished last quarter."
In upcoming newsletters, I'll dig deeper into why this transition is challenging and more importantly, how to do it successfully. I'll share what I've seen work (and fail) in organizations I've led and advised. This might be the most important—and hardest—leadership work we can undertake.
Even imperfect goal-setting that improves over time is exponentially better than judging performance by who's in their seat or monitoring keystrokes.
Let's make it happen.
Part two:
What’s worked — and more importantly not worked — in your experience? Drop me a note here in Substack, or reach out: I’m brian@theworkforward.com
Measuring productivity based on outcomes definitely takes more effort, and I think that is why the default is just based on "do they look busy". That's much simpler and cleaner - though not a realistic measure of how valuable they are to the organization.
Just because you walk out the door doesn’t mean work stops. People are thinking about it at home, in the evenings, on weekends. I used to answer emails all weekend long, late into the night. There’s a lot of productivity theater for the sake of it, but unfortunately, leadership often buys into it.