With its origins in workarounds to dupe the technology that monitors activity in the digital world, the term ‘productivity theatre’ covers a range of dodges employed to make it look like you’re busy when you’re not.

Addressing the problem, however, opens a can of worms concerning much wider issues, such as employee engagement, empowerment and trust. It also potentially highlights a dearth of inspirational leadership in corporate Britain. And for finance professionals it elicits the age-old question, “Are we measuring the right things?”

In a way, the human behaviour behind productivity theatre is nothing new. Many accountants who are a little longer in the tooth may remember the days when a colleague would leave a jacket over their chair to suggest they were still in the office while they lingered at a lengthy lunch, for example. 

Now, with many hybrid workers out of sight, the post-pandemic equivalents include:

• faking activity to fool digital surveillance;
• sending a flurry of emails during out-of-office hours to suggest commitment above and beyond; and
• filling the digital diary with appointments that don’t exist.

Digital surveillance tools can include software that takes screenshots from the laptops of home workers or monitors mouse movements as a measure of screen presence. But these Big Brother approaches beg the question, “What have we all become?”

Surely, the answer to productivity theatre is to go back to basics regarding the purpose of work. While everyone can be forgiven for not being 100% on it 100% of the time, the actors in this new productivity theatre will all have a few things in common:

• they won’t be clear about their personal goal or how to achieve it through their own everyday actions;
• they will feel they’re not empowered and not trusted;
• they certainly won’t be motivated or inspired;
• they will regard themselves as judged by the surveillance tools rather than by the quality of their results; and
• they won’t have received proper coaching or feedback from their boss.

The answer to the problem is not to think up new ways of watching them. The answer is effective engagement, better leadership and the re-establishment of trust. Instead of spying on our colleagues we should put in place the tools to truly measure their results. We should also engage them in solving the problems we face in maximising our performance. 

The pre-pandemic approach to leadership was biased towards command and control rather than trust and inspire, but COVID-19 taught us that the more effective way of leading in the hybrid world is the latter.

Right now, as we face up to a scale and pace of change that few businesses have encountered before, across the corporate world there is a widening gap between strategy and execution. In this environment, it is no longer effective to push down the answers from the top, and more and more organisations are using processes that help people meet in the middle. The C-suite agrees the long-term strategy and vision, and the big company-wide goals; the middle of the organisation works out how to smash them by looking at everyday actions and achievable shorter-term goals.

At Black Isle Group we are passionate about our six-step process to help everyone in the team to smash their goals.  

1) Be clear on your goal: Make sure that everyone involved perfectly understands what’s required. Then organise a ‘10-week sprint’: get everyone together and motivate and inspire them to smash that goal.

2) Act small and often: Sit down with each member of the team and be very specific about what they need to do to contribute to smashing the goal. Encourage them to focus, not be distracted, and stick to the task.

3) Track and measure success: We wanted to measure our progress and make sure everyone could see it as we went along. To do this we devised an app called Nudge. It did two things: it Nudged people every day on their phones or PCs to carry out their key individual actions; it also gave the team access to high-quality tracking and insights about how they were getting on.

4) Aim for progress not perfection: It’s consistency that you’re trying to achieve, not 100% infallibility.

5)Stay accountable: We sought to make everyone accountable and to ensure they maintained momentum, so everyone got a one-to-one peer coach. At the end of the week everyone on the team had a coaching session to discuss their progress, their challenges and their approach to the following week’s effort.

6) Celebrate your wins, no matter how small: We made sure that each week we celebrated the small successes, and we called out the achievements of members of the team, especially where they had helped colleagues and worked in a collaborative way.

To solve the problems of productivity theatre we need to drop the Big Brother act and focus on how we adopt a new approach to bridge the gap between strategy and execution. We will never make everyone in our companies a model A worker, but it must be the mission of senior leaders, especially finance professionals, to walk the path of motivation, empowerment and trust.

Unless we continue to pursue these fundamentals, we will never maximise the potential of individuals, teams and organisations. Productivity theatre is a symptom. It’s not the problem.

Jeremy Campbell is the CEO of performance improvement and technology business Black Isle Group, an expert on behavioural science and an executive coach.