Over the past few decades, most organisations have evolved a work culture that is actively detrimental to employee productivity.

These seemingly well-meaning practices are the very reason we aren’t able to get any meaningful work done during office hours:

1. Frequent meetings

“Managers in one survey reported 83% of the meetings on their calendars were unproductive, or that US-based professionals rated meetings as the ‘number one office productivity killer.‘”

– Harvard Business Review

It is not only that time in meetings is sub-optimal, the more serious problem is that there aren’t enough stretches of time in between meetings to get work done.

‘To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.’

– Peter F. Drucker

Almost no one, whether working in a startup or a large corporation has access to large uninterrupted chunks of time.

If you need a stretch of undisturbed time to work on anything hard or meaningful you need to do that on your own time, staying late after work or starting early.

It’s almost as if office hours are intended for meetings and calls, not quality work.

2. Open offices and instant messaging = Double whammy for employee productivity!

Even if we happen to be ‘lucky’ enough to find a clean stretch of time on our calendar, our ‘open office’ setup, designed to maximise interruptions (in the garb of serendipity) is guaranteed to disrupt our flow.

Though something far more insidious than open offices has evolved over the last few years. ‘Instant messaging’ tools such as Slack have also fed this ‘interruption culture’ and created an expectation of instant responsiveness.

We appreciate colleagues who drop whatever they’re doing to respond instantly to our requests. And we happily reciprocate at the cost of our own productivity.

We seem to have confused employee ‘responsiveness’ with employee ‘productivity’.

According to Cal Newport in the New Yorker:

‘Data gathered by the software firm RescueTime estimate that employees who use Slack check communications tools more frequently than non-users, accessing them once every five minutes on average—an absurdly high rate of interruption.

​Neuroscientists and psychologists teach us that our attention is fundamentally single-tasked, and switching it from one target to another is detrimental to productivity.

​We’re simply not wired to monitor an ongoing stream of unpredictable communication at the same time that we’re trying to also finish actual work.’

– Cal Newport

Seems like we don’t understand the true cost of this 3-second interruption.

‘Short interruptions – such as the few seconds it takes to silence that buzzing smartphone – have a surprisingly large effect on one’s ability to accurately complete a task. The study, in which 300 people performed a sequence-based procedure on a computer, found that interruptions of about three seconds doubled the error rate.’

– Michigan State University

3. Standardised office hours

There was a time when everybody needed to be on the factory floor at the same time, otherwise, assembly lines just wouldn’t work.

While knowledge work has evolved decades beyond the factory floor, our work practices seem to be stuck in the mid-20th century.

“if your team members are hitting their individual goals and objectives and key results, ask yourself if enforcing set times in the office really matters or if you are just enforcing them for appearances’ sake.”

– Matt Mochary

Some of us are early birds and some of us are night owls. Our most productive hours differ significantly from those of our colleagues.

Yet, we are all expected to be in the office during the same hours. Facing the same rush hour traffic and painful commutes even though most knowledge work can happen asynchronously.

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Frequent meetings, interruptions driven by open offices and instant messaging, and standardised work hours, all considered elements of an open, progressive work culture have destroyed our productivity.

The sooner we learn how to manage without them, the sooner we can reclaim our individual, team and organisational potential.

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To help your teams maximise productivity in a hybrid world, I’ve launched a new training – ‘Powerful Productivity Habits for Busy Executives‘ to help empower your team with frameworks and tools to be effective in a hybrid, fast-changing world.