How do you measure a knowledge worker’s productivity? In the industrial age, we studied time and motion on the factory line. It’s hard to say how new knowledge gets made. It’s even harder to put a value on it. This confounds workers and managers alike. It’s also one reason why organizations become overrun with busy work.
The purpose of busy work is to create the appearance of busyness. Its most common forms include meetings, email and documentation. These activities should properly be thought of as overhead—a tax on the organization that we should strive to minimize. But the busy worker’s incentives are perverse: more is always better. Busy work is so ingrained in some organizations that we confuse it for productive output.
The cure? Measure outcomes, not output. Make sure that every team has clear customer and business goals, and a way to measure progress towards them. Stop asking for status reports. Get the teams to demonstrate their work instead.