During Covid times, has employee productivity declined ?

Has the Covid time brought about improvement in employee productivity as they are working from home or has it lowered the employee productivity ? This is an interesting aspect which we would be interested in knowing as almost everybody in the knowledge based industry has been working from home for almost eight months now.

In cutting edge research conducted by Professors from Harvard Business School and New York University it is reported that while the best corportations have reported improvement in productivity during the Covid times, the majority of organisations have reported fall in productivity.  We all were under the impression that Work from Home has reduced the stress employees undergo daily going to office / work (saved on an average 48.5 mins time for each employee) and hence the productivity would increase, but that has not been the case.

Employee productivity depends on three important factors, 

• time
• talent (human resources) and 
• energy
  

The time each employee dedicates to productive work, the talent he displays while engaged in his work and finally the discretionary energy the employee is willing to give to the company while carrying out his work.

The amount of talent and energy an employee spends at work also brings in another aspect of work, the engagement.

As per research conducted by Eric Garton and Micheal Mankins and reported in HBR of December 2020 (click here) 

• an engaged employee is found to be 40% more productive than a normal employee (satisfied worker) and
• an inspired employee is found to be 55% more productive than an engaged employee. 

In the best organisations, Covid time has resulted in improvement of productivity by almost 20%. Because of virtual attendance, talented employees are able to be part of multiple teams across geographies enabling their contribution at different places at the same time, resulting in better attainment of organisational objectives and hence improvement in productivity.  

But most of the organisations have reported drop in productivity as the organisations have lost talent and have not been able to inspire their employees due to many reasons, mainly due to family pressure, medical emergencies at home, the caution and care at home against catching Covid infection may have dampened the eagerness of employees to give their best.

Sagging energy levels of the employees have been found the biggest cause for drop in productivity and efforts by organisations to improve the energy levels have not had great effort except in some organisations like Adobe. Adobe has been able to tap into the discretionary energy of the employees evident by a high employee engagement score by giving the employees a no-layoff pledge, an extra day off in a month and by updating them with frequent updates on Covid and their business. 

Final Outcome: 

While the best organisations have experienced an improvement in productivity of 5-8%, other organisations have experienced a drop in productivity of 3-6% due to wasteful ways of working, inefficient collaboration and decreased levels of employee engagement.

The important learning we get from the above study is that employee engagement has suffered badly during these Covid times. We look forward to better employee engagement measures by organisations to improve employee morale and productivity in future.

George..