True Engagement Key to Increasing Productivity

Reports highlighting Canada’s dragging productivity provide us with a space to discuss what Peter F. Drucker defined as the greatest opportunity and challenge of this century: knowledge worker productivity.

If Canada’s productivity is any indication, it looks as though Drucker was right yet again.

With the move to a knowledge economy, Drucker argued, workers are no longer interchangeable, as they were often viewed in the manufacturing sector, but instead hold the main capital and assets of an organization. It’s in their heads. They carry it around.

In Drucker’s terms, knowledge workers own the means of production, and because of this experience an unprecedented level of freedom and mobility in their work.

This presents a unique challenge to organizations tasked with attracting and holding the best knowledge workers, as well as making their knowledge productive.

So how do you engage people who hold the keys to all that power and productivity?

First, understand people’s aspirations and provide them a way to fulfill those through their work. Believing in the cause one works for can trigger fuller engagement.

Organizations that serve a higher purpose will be better able to do this. The thinking afforded by models like Holacracy or social business provide a direct connect between what an organization contributes as a whole and what individuals in that business do every day. Adopting social objectives connected to the environment, social justice and fair trade can also inspire and engage people in their work.

A cause alone likely isn’t quite enough though. We still need ways for people to engage, develop and receive feedback.

Many of the organizing methods Axiom News covers every day are helpful in providing tools and structures for true engagement. These include Appreciative Inquiry, story-sharing, strength-based development and servant leadership; and organizational designs like democratic workplaces, co-operatives and employee-owned firms. These methods are so imbued with engagement potential they feel more like movements than methods.

Appreciative Inquiry: Asking questions of many people, and being open to where the answers take you is a very powerful way to engage people. When people focus on strengths and co-create direction they become more fully engaged.

Related to Appreciative Inquiry is story sharing. In our newsroom we see, every day, the power of asking people life-affirming questions and sharing their stories publicly providing others inspiration, knowledge and context for their own work and contribution.

Strength-based development: Focusing on the knowledge-worker’s strengths and cultivating their unique personal gifts engages people.

Servant leaders create opportunities for others to develop. This takes the ego out of leadership and puts the focus on others, causes leadership to contribute beyond merely directing. Through servant leadership the knowledge worker is better able to do their work according to their notions and gifting.

Then there is workplace democracy whether in the form of formal ownership or, more mildly, participative management practices. The usefulness in workplace democracy is that it engages people. It provides people with clear pathways to information, decision-making, influence, and ultimately personal vestment in the work of a place.

The latest stats on productivity in this country (Canada) pose an obvious question: What to do about it?

Our stories provide some of the answers.

Productivity can be viewed as a relatively cold and uninteresting metric or possibly a disempowering or depressing one. Or, it could be taken as a sign of how well we’re doing at fully engaging people’s talents according to their greatest aspirations. Seen this way, productivity gains a higher purpose. The metric itself also become more useful as we’ll know what activities it is accounting for.