HR leaders must address four emerging myths around employee productivity that could impact their organisations’ ability to achieve desired growth, according to Gartner.
A November 2024 survey of more than 450 actively employed CEOs and other senior executive business leaders revealed that their most critical challenges to leading and growing their enterprise are talent and workforce (23%) and culture and people management (13%).
“As traditional avenues of growth like market consolidation, labor arbitrage and cheap financing show signs of diminishing returns, CEOs are looking to employee productivity to fuel their growth ambitions in 2025 and beyond,” says Brent Cassell, vice-president: advisory in the Gartner HR practice. “However, productivity remains difficult for most employers to define, measure and impact.”
Gartner has identified a working measure of productivity for knowledge workers that significantly improves business outcomes, such as revenue, profitability and brand reputation: employees doing quality work consistently and on time – employee efficiency – and employees devoting their time and skills to work that is results oriented and focused on organisational priorities – employee value creation.
The four emerging productivity myths that HR must address to drive their organizations desired business outcomes include:
Myth 1: Productivity Is Not HR’s Job
Fact: A December 2024 Gartner survey of more than 1 900 managers of knowledge workers found that with direct HR involvement, employees can be up to 11% more productive.
“Employees, managers, and business leaders view productivity in different – and occasionally contradictory – ways and HR is the glue that holds them together,” says Swagatam Basu, senior director in the Gartner HR practice.
The HR function must do four things to play an active partnership role in shaping productivity initiatives at their organisation:
- Include productivity in HR strategy to secure their seat at the table
- Identify collaboration opportunities for cross-functional productivity initiatives
- Articulate the talent tradeoffs of productivity initiatives to the C-Suite
- Champion employee needs in productivity strategy
Myth 2: Using AI Equals Quick Productivity Growth
Fact: While many leaders expect GenAI to be a growth and productivity driver, a December 2024 Gartner survey of more than 3 400 knowledge workers revealed that just 8% of employees are fully capturing productivity gains by using GenAI tools often and experiencing both speed and quality improvements.
To achieve the desired productivity benefits of GenAI, HR must plug three productivity leaks: limited awareness, inconsistent adoption and ineffective use. To do so, HR must leverage its core competencies in change management, learning and development and employee experience.
When an organization addresses employees’ awareness, adoption and use of GenAI, employees can be up to 8% more productive, and they’re 2,7-times as likely to experience speed and quality gains from GenAI.
Myth 3: Onsite Employees Are More Productive Than Hybrid Employees
Fact: A December 2024 Gartner survey of 3,061 managers of knowledge workers found that the same percentage of onsite employees and hybrid employees (21%) were ranked as highly productive.
“Since onsite employees and hybrid employees are equally productive, it’s clear that productivity is not about where work gets done, it’s about how work gets done,” says Basu.
Gartner analysis of more than 100 work attributes revealed that a supportive team culture has the greatest positive impact on the productivity of both hybrid and onsite employees, increasing employee productivity by up to 11%.
To create a supportive team culture that facilitates productivity, HR leaders need to do two things:
- Enable managers to build team environments where discussions of productivity are used as a positive driving force for team initiatives
- Encourage teams to decide their own core productivity values and ensure feedback is in-line with those ideals and associated behaviors
Myth 4: More Data Improves Productivity
Fact: Organizations that rely too heavily on quantitative data to improve employee productivity can omit non-measurable and non-digital labour, inadvertently encourage employees to game the system and negatively impact employee engagement.
“Data is useful, but on its own can provide an incomplete picture,” says Cassell. “What’s needed is understanding the context in which that data was collected. Investing in getting detailed contextual information for a focused set of metrics has almost twice the impact on employee productivity compared to investing in acquiring more quantitative data on a variety of metrics.”
HR can take two actions to ensure their productivity data comes with the needed context:
- Involve those who know the work best in shaping productivity metrics
- Include local perspectives in interpretation of productivity metrics
Organizations that take action on all four emerging productivity myths can increase employee productivity by up to 35%, which translates into an individual employee working 2,8 more hours a day, generating more than $47 000+ in extra revenue annually.