How to Solve Remote Work’s ‘Productivity Paranoia’

Microsoft’s latest Work Trend Index (released September 22) surveyed 20,000 employees at companies around the world and showed that 87 percent felt they were just as productive – if not more so – at home than at the office. But their bosses disagreed… and it wasn’t even close. Only 12 percent of managers said they fully believe their team is just as productive when working remotely as they are at their desks in the office. “We need to overcome what we call ‘productivity paranoia,'” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. He added that the discrepancy in survey data between workers and managers shows a “real disconnect in terms of expectations and how they feel.”

If you break down Nadella’s diagnosis, he described two problems: paranoia and productivity. The first has no place to drive business strategy or approach to human capital. Irrational suspicion? As a principle of human resource management, it sucks. In contrast, productivity is a fundamental business issue. Is the way your team works optimized? Do they have the right training, the right tools, the right time, and the right network of people to get the job done? For knowledge-based professions in the 21st century, this is not a question of location. It’s the wrong question when the nagging thought in a manager’s mind is, “I can’t see you so I don’t know what you’re doing.“The real question is:”Got what you need to get the job done?“

There is an argument that some of the seeds of the Great Resignation and now Quiet Quitting were sown in a rush to go far afield, forced by the pandemic in early 2020. As Chris Marsh, director at 451 Research, part of S&P Market Intelligence, has explained, the initial move to remote brought to the surface any unspoken assumptions in organizations about how work gets done. He says:

“It showed how little strategic thinking … historical companies have really thought about how work actually happens, how it’s organized, how it’s designed and executed, other than having a set of business goals and a set of enabling technologies , and then just expecting things like alignment and focus and commitment and even productivity to just happen.

The “Zoom boom” — the rise of video conferencing technologies like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or WebEx — kept teams communicating with each other, but it didn’t solve the more fundamental problems of how work should get done. Since then we’ve all been playing catch-up.

Our research of 400 digital creative teams in the US and UK found that only 22 percent expect a full return to office work. But some fundamental productivity issues remained with remote and hybrid work. Most notably, 58 percent of respondents say unnecessary duplication or rework is a greater challenge today than it was 12 to 18 months ago. This undermines employee productivity, effectiveness and job satisfaction.

Miscommunication between teams collaborating virtually is another major pain point for 47 percent of respondents. Another 53 percent say they had more difficulty finding the right digital assets at the right time. Simple but essential steps for creative teams to work remotely effectively are broken down: how files are stored and tagged so they can be found, how licenses and rights are managed, and how draft versions of images, videos and copies are created during production to be controlled. These difficulties and inefficiencies are obstacles to effective work. Half of companies say the speed of creating new digital assets is a greater challenge today than it was 12 to 18 months ago. Is that because remote work is on hold or because they haven’t provided remote teams with the tools and workflows to get the job done?