Editorial
If you were working in an office in the 1980s or even the 1990s, you went to work, made phone calls, sent faxes and opened letters. When email and cell phones were introduced, it likely was a huge leap forward for your work life (if not your work life balance). But today, while we’ve seen changes — especially with asynchronous communication and project management tools — they're just faster versions of tools that we’re already using, and they’re only driving incremental improvement.
Most of the progress in recent decades has involved making cheaper and more convenient versions of products that already existed. Robert Gordon, author of The Rise and Fall of American Growth, argues that technology today isn’t transforming our professional lives that much. Computers gave us a lot of productivity growth back in the 1990s and early 2000s, but today’s inventions haven’t really changed work the same way.
In 1987, economist Robert Solow summed up this dichotomy between slowing productivity growth in the U.S. economy in the face of exponential increases in computing power by saying, "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." So how do we drive forward?
Understanding the Productivity Paradox
The way the productivity paradox unfolded is best described by Stuart MacDonald. According to MacDonald, the paradox began in the early 1970s and progressed through five stages.
- Stage 1: Not much is known about the possibilities of technology, and expectations are huge. There is an idea that technology could displace labor entirely. Ever since this early period of investment in IT, it was assumed that labor productivity was the correct way to measure the impact IT had.
- Stage 2: Starting in the late 1970s, this stage showed the first indications that the results of IT investment were less than expected. Companies continued to invest heavily in technology. Most companies didn't try to evaluate the results of their IT investment. Those that did usually only used return on investment calculations.
- Stage 3: In this stage, which spanned the early 1980s, companies began to use IT strategy to create a competitive advantage.
- Stage 4: By the late 1980s, IT investments shifted to management information systems. Technology was no longer expected to have a direct impact on productivity. It was also during this time that numerous explanations for the productivity paradox emerged.
- Stage 5: After the late 1980s, most investment in IT was in telecommunications. Expectations of productivity increases were further lowered.
Productivity growth in most of the world’s rich countries has been below expectations since around 2004. Especially vexing, says David Rotman in The MIT Review, is the sluggish pace of what economists call total factor productivity—the part that accounts for the contributions of innovation and technology.
Related Article: What Happened to the Promised Future of Work?
Is Innovation the Key to Solving the Productivity Paradox?
In a time of smartphones and self-driving cars, how can the key economic measure of technological progress be so lackluster? According to MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson, what’s happening to productivity now may be a replay of the late 1980s, before the desktop computer and the internet spurred productivity to climb. Brynjolfsson says breakthroughs in machine learning, image recognition and AI could lead to “eye-popping” gains.
Old habits die hard. Most organizations still run through email, phone calls and physical meetings. Even when smarter technology is available, most people stick to reading and answering emails on their laptops or smartphones.
Nien-Ling Wacker, the founder of Laserfiche, used to call this conundrum the “paper security blanket.” It’s not that paper is more efficient or easier to use than electronic documents or workflows, but having all those documents in a file cabinet and walking paper forms around the office is comforting. That’s because people cling to what’s familiar.
Because people crave the comfort of the familiar — even when they rationally know it’s less efficient and productive — it’s important to drive change iteratively through baby steps. You need to provide a runway for onboarding and break down the transition to new technology in steps. For example, if you’re trying to get rid of internal email and get your staff communicating asynchronously through messaging tools like Slack or project management tools like Asana, you may not immediately get rid of your email program. Start by moving communication over to collaboration tools to work out any process issues before you turn off the ability for your team to send emails. Eventually, you’ll need to move people over to the new process and system, so set reasonable timelines for the transition.
Related Article: How to Manage Change with Change-weary Teams3 Ways to Escape the Productivity Paradox
The Solow computer paradox says that as more investments are made in technology, worker productivity goes down instead of up. A 2011 study in Australian Science hypothesizes that this paradox exists because most companies implement technology poorly. Technology on its own can’t increase productivity. Instead, it’s how users adopt the technology and how the technology is designed and implemented that truly impacts productivity.
So, if the productivity paradox isn’t about technology, but instead is about its adoption and implementation, how do you escape it? Here are some ideas to try.
- Bridge the expectations gap. Up until the early 2000s, people mostly used computers and software at work. If they had technology at home, it was far less capable than what they used at the office — as anyone who remembers Microsoft Office and Microsoft Home can attest. Today, we get the latest and best devices as consumers — and we expect our technology at work to keep up. Employees come to work expecting a sleek Tesla and instead get the Flintstones foot-powered car. Provide employees with intuitive, fun-to-use, powerful technology that will encourage them to abandon email and phone calls.
- Ditch the paper security blanket. If you’re exploring new and smarter ways of working, you must support people as they learn new tools and technologies. But don’t rely on the security blanket of familiar technology for too long. If you’re trying to get the organization to adopt asynchronous communication tools like Slack, you have to eventually get rid of internal email. At a certain point, you need to make it easier to do things the new (right) way, instead of falling back onto the comfort of old faithful technology.
- Develop organizational self-awareness. To really improve productivity, you must understand what work truly drives value, and focus your employees on those tasks. Bring employees into planning sessions where appropriate, because if they don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes, they can’t fully invest themselves in any changes that might be coming. And don’t forget to listen to feedback from the front line, as they may have very different views of the usefulness of technology to improving productivity than you do.
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“During the past two decades or so — a period of rapid technology innovation, which produced laptops, smartphones, ubiquitous cloud computing and Google — American productivity growth has suffered a sustained slowdown. We gained access to an armada of supercharged workplace tools, and yet we’re not getting much more done,” wrote Cal Newport in The New Yorker.
In the end, escaping the productivity paradox comes back to effectively managing change — not just the change driven by technology, but the fear that comes along with its adoption and implementation. We can all change technology, infrastructure, processes and policies. But without changing people, we won’t see the lasting results from that change.
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