Reclaiming Productivity: Aligning Work, Learning, and Societal Needs

‘Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before,’ said Franz Kafka. That’s pretty much the same as learning. I’d like to see education and workplace learning be more aware of productivity as a worthy idea in this wider sense of the word.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman also said, “Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run, it is almost everything”. He has a point. Producing autonomous and productive adults is surely what we aspire to as a collective goal of a nation. A country's ability to improve its standard of living depends on its ability to raise its output per worker. Isn't that what we want from L&D?

There is a sense that we’ve lost something; people not caring, huge numbers not in employment, yet massive skills shortages. In the UK we have an economically-inactive group of 9 million working-age people. Around 1.5 million are unemployed, about 2.7 million are students (here, I’d argue, we have too many staying on for too long in HE). We have 2.3 million ‘sick’, which is shocking and 1.5 million as carers. We should be tackling this head on.

We have an education system way out of kilter with societal needs. A realignment of education to life and a living would help. The looking down upon, defunding and eradication of any vestige of vocational learning from curricula in schools and Universities has not helped. We want more houses but don’t have the skilled people to build them; green energy but have a generation who can hold placards, sit in front of traffic and throw paint at art but can’t actually do anything practical to build the green technology we need; more nurses but have turned it into a graduate profession disenfranchising working class entrants.

In workplace learning we need to stop distracting ourselves with abstractions. The 'Skills-Based Organisation' has long been an empty trope, because we have been seduced into thinking that abstract nouns like leadership (lots of spend but so little of it), culture, diversity, equality, values, inclusion, resilience etc are 'skills' or some mysterious miasma that will encourage and produce skills. 

The very idea that skills have anything to do with text-based learning and assessment or sitting around tables scribbling on pieces of flipchart paper is laughable. A renewed focus on productivity would help but we're not much interested in actual outputs, only abstract inputs. Training so often kills productivity by distracting people from reality. People love a cosy chat with others who agree with them. But this is so often a zero-sum game - the net gain in terms of change, skills, productivity is zero. In fact it may be a negative-sum game as it takes up tons of time, costs and tends to fix people into old, fossilised behaviours, meaning absolutely nothing changes or improves.

Productivity is the ratio of output to inputs, which can be applied to people, not cruelly or mechanically but sensitively. Yet we flee from evaluation and measurement as we’re scared of what we may find. Productivity can be difficult to measure and improve but it translates into more satisfied employees a better standard of living for all and the crazy idea that your kids will be better off than you.