New Ways of Working: The Social Economics of Productivity

Abstract

After sketching out the alarming state of productivity and its organizational causes, this chapter analyses data gathered during the COVID-19 lockdowns – a global live experiment in human behavior and performance – to draw implications for productivity improvements, the future of work and ways to leverage digital technologies. Many alleged benefits of co-presence in a shared workplace – the office container – are just weak substitutes to compensate for deficiencies in the real and productive content of work. The temporary elimination of the office led to an illumination of largely ignored and untapped potential that can be captured by any organization to achieve major improvements in performance and satisfaction at work. This potential hinges on what we call “relational productivity”. Relational productivity has nothing to do with co-location, physical proximity, or their often elusive benefits. Rather, it is about connectedness and three complementarities that multiply the productivity of human efforts. Relational productivity is the essence of efficiency in organizations: how one's effort increases the yield of each other's effort. The lessons go far beyond the pros and cons of physical, hybrid, and remote work settings. They are relevant to any organization, irrespective of where work takes place. By deconstructing the social economics of work into pure complementarity mechanisms – thus eliminating many illusions that accumulated over decades of misleading hard and soft approaches – it becomes possible to reconstruct the future ways of working according to the new challenges and opportunities that organizations face.

Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.

Martin Luther King