Productivity Pressure in Management

Note: this doc’s audience is leadership & managers. Managers have an elevated role because they sit at the neck of operations, and if they are not on the same page with leadership on defining the team culture and how it exemplifies itself, the team culture effectively does not exist for people on the ground.

People with the trite gripe of management usually take the frame of “true productivity” vs “hours of work”. But this framing is misguided. Given a comfortable work schedule, putting in the necessary hours is a necessary but not sufficient condition for true productivity. It’s one thing to claim staying the hours does not mean being productive, but it’s quite another thing to claim not having enough time somehow makes one more productive.

Look. John Carmack agrees!

The current standard of work schedule is quite comfortable. If one really does the math, counting the wall clock 9-5, 8 hours, subtracting 1 hour of lunch time, and 1 hour of ramping up & dilly dallying, one should aim for 6 core hours of productivity on a work day. It’s a worthwhile internal goal, and it’s OK to not be like that every day. If people have off days, personal obligations, appointments, they should put an OUT code on the calendar. They don’t have to make up for them if employment policy does not warrant that, but it’s far better to have visibility across the team, because it provides clarity and improves coordination and morale. You don’t want a 996 culture, but you don’t want to encourage eating croissants and watching videos all day. You want to take the frame of “we have big responsibilities to this world and ourselves - our work saves lives, and is highly technical and cool”. People can take these skills anywhere, so on a fundamental level, they get it.

Moreover, people should be able to accomplish one or two meaningful things per day. They should be able to articulate why they are meaningful, and describe the challenges. It closes the goal-setting loop.

This productivity pressure has to be gently present throughout the management chain as a background hum. The executives need to feel the strongest pressure, to a personal level, and drive their teams towards progress. They need to get their lieutenants on board with this line of thinking and evaluate how faithfully they are carrying it out. They need to have a center and a good sense of what timely progress feels like, and optimize towards the objectives. They also need to always look for personnel alternatives and backups, so that they can realize their missions. It hurts the most when people with bigger organizational responsibilities are lax. In the absence of this pressure and drive, organizations will not scale, sometimes even negatively.