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Inside this issue:
- Protect focus time
- Give real autonomy
- Recognize actual work
Hey HR Folks,
Your best performer got interrupted eight times yesterday and still hit their numbers. Imagine what they would do with two clean hours.
Most productivity problems boil down to sources of friction, and a lot of that friction is built into how you run things.
1. Kill the distractions before you buy another tool
Open offices and back to back pings feel productive. They are not. 80% of high performers get interrupted five or more times a day, and 40% get interrupted more than eight times. Nearly two thirds of employees call their office environment too distracting to get real work done.
- Block two focus only hours on every calendar this week
- Turn off chat notifications during that window
- Set up one bookable quiet space for deep work
- Ask your top two performers where they lose the most time
See what’s really killing productivity →
2. Hand over control instead of more instructions
Autonomy is usually the first thing companies lose as they grow. Managers add process, layers, and check ins meant to help, and employees end up doing less thinking on their own. Teams that keep decision making close to the work stay faster than the ones that don’t.
- Give one team full control over how they hit next month’s target
- Set the outcome and skip the step-by-step instructions
- Ask every manager to name one decision they can hand off
- Judge the work on output, not hours logged in
Read how autonomy drives performance →
3. Make recognition specific or it does not count
MIT professor Dan Ariely ran an experiment where one group watched their finished work get shredded in front of them. That group needed twice the pay to keep going compared to a group whose work was acknowledged. 93% of employees want to be recognized at least once a quarter, and a Harvard Business Review study found recognition has a real impact on engagement for 72% of respondents.
- Call out one finished piece of work by name this week
- Skip “great job” and name the actual output
- Ask managers when they last acknowledged a completed task
- Add a two-minute shoutout to Friday standup
Read what actually motivates employees →
Your productivity audit for this week 👀
Pick one team and run through this:
- How many times were they interrupted yesterday?
- Do they control how they approach their work, or just when they show up?
- Was their last finished task acknowledged, and by name?
- What is one decision you can hand off to them this week?
Most productivity problems are not about effort. They are about the small frictions nobody bothered to fix.
Talk soon.
