From February 2020 The average time employees spent in meetings in Teams increased by 252%. however, 85% of managers do not believe that switching to hybrid work during the pandemic has improved productivity. The disparity noted in the new Microsoft Work Trends Index shows how, even in the face of increased commitment to work, executives are obsessed with the idea that opportunities for performance improvement are still high and that employees are not doing enough. What the experts called productivity paranoia, youn feeling on the verge of being harassed, which leads to obsessive control of staffin relation to which there is little trust and for which, for this reason, not all companies are ready to provide either hybrid work or smartworking, as evidenced by the massive return to offices imposed by high-tech giants, starting with Elon Musk.
“Managers think their employees are unproductive while employees think they are productive, and in many cases they even feel exhausted.he explained in an interview Bloomberg Television Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “One of the most important things for us in this new world of work and hybrid work is fill this paradoxTo this end, he explains Forbes AfricaMicrosoft has introduced new features and invested in product updates for Viva, the tech giant’s employee management platform, which will release an app called Viva Pulse in the coming months that will let you get feedback from employees and introduce a feature that uses “artificial intelligence to match questions.” employees with company experts. Thus, the efficiency of the processes will also contribute to the increase in the productivity of workers.
Physiological peaks and subsequent declines in production must be taken into account. According to Microsoft, 30% of productivity peaks in the morning, early afternoon, and, to a lesser extent, around 10:00 pm. Although it is commonly believed that productivity increases before and after lunch, this third peak illustrates how remote work has broken already blurry the limits of the right to disable. Currently average working day increased by 46 minutes per day that is, 13% since the beginning of the pandemic, and because of this asynchronous program, managers and ordinary employees were burned out.
Of course, an increase in working hours does not necessarily lead to better results. It’s no coincidence that after 18 months of hyperproductivity during the pandemic, numbers have declined, even though time spent at work has, in many cases, remained the same. Reduced results not only due to physiological fatigue of employees, but also due to the quality of the workforce. According to Wall Street JournalThe US economy has made up for 22 million jobs lost at the beginning of the pandemic, but the labor market has suffocated due to a lack of properly trained workers. On paper, the number of employees of many companies is close to pre-pandemic numbers or even increased; in practice, companies are pushing many workers into positions for which they are not quite ready to meet the demand for goods and services. In addition, hybrid work does not allow optimal integration into the company’s mechanisms, which only contributes to uncertainty and an atmosphere of low trust between managers and employees.
The aforementioned Microsoft report shows that the differences show up in the data: hybrid worker managers, for example, are more likely to distrust their employees than field managers (49% vs. 36%). In turn, leaders must contend with the intense pressure and high expectations they are subjected to in order to meet the high standards of business performance. In a poisonous vicious circle where enough is never enough.
Source: Elle