Managers are scared to death of actually defining “productivity”

The dirtiest little secret about work is that in most organizations, the only quantifiable metrics come from (a) sales and (b) operations, and the only metric anyone really looks at is stuff related to cost, spend, margins, and profit (i.e. “the financials”). Over time, organizations have tried to “data-ify” other departments, like HR and stuff — or the glorious “data-driven marketing” that never is driven by anything except the gut feel of the person with the highest salary — and broadly it hasn’t worked. Why? Lots of reasons, many of them detailed here. “Data-driven” is a thing we say, but it’s not who we are.

But what’s scary is that companies need to hire for “growth,” and most companies honestly over-staff themselves because they’re scared of some ball dropping somewhere. Then you bring in COVID and the remote shift. Now you have a situation where managers, who are almost never trained to do anything remotely related to management, have more people, and those people could be spread out. So many managers start with the assumption of “If I can’t see this peon, they’re probably slacking off” — work is much more about control than about productivity, all-in — but now, to be all manager-y and “productive”-y, they need to define what “productivity” is for a further-afield workforce.