There’s a lot of talk about burnout these days. Workers are increasingly feeling exhausted. Anxiety levels are on the rise. Employee turnover jumped from an average of 45% in 2019 to 57% in 2020.
The question is, what are we going to do about it?
Computer science professor Cal Newport thinks that part of the answer is to take a good hard look at current workloads and find a more natural way to work, a process he calls “slow productivity.”
To get a handle on what it might mean to work more naturally, Newport did some digging into the productivity habits of hunter-gatherers. What he found was that people tended to stay busy but the pace of their busy-ness varied with the task at hand. The type of work they did demanded particular levels of skill and craftsmanship.
What Would Slow Productivity Look Like?
Newport suggests we might take a cue from pre-industrial workers and adopt the following guidelines:
- Do fewer things
- Do things at a natural pace
- Obsess over the quality of the things you do.
One practical way to make this happen would be to put all projects in a common pool and have workers choose from these projects as they have availability. They would work at a natural pace and focus on quality above all else.
The end result should be a more natural, and satisfying work experience.
Wait, Not So Fast
I’m no expert but I feel like I’ve heard this pitch before. A little Googling shows that Swedish Car maker Volvo experimented with a team assembly system at their Kalmar plant, that sounds very much like what Newport is suggesting. Instead of vehicles rolling down an assembly line where each worker has just one job, the vehicles move freely around the plant where teams of workers would put entire assemblies together.
By all measures the Kalmar plant and the team assembly system were a success. Unfortunately Volvo was forced to scrap the whole thing during an economic downturn, consolidating manufacturing in their older, traditional Torslanda plant. Leadership valued having centralized control over worker satisfaction or product quality.
Then, in 1999 Volvo sold its luxury car division to Ford Motor Company, which in Slow Productivity terms is a little bit like selling your soul to the devil.
Again, I’m no expert, but I think there are some deep systemic issues that will need to be addressed before Slow Productivity ever becomes a real thing.
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