![\"Busy](\"/article-assets/gestire-collaboratori-poco-produttivi/gestire-collaboratori-poco-produttivi-produttivo-vs-affaccendato.jpg\")
Managing a team also means dealing with situations where some people struggle to move their work forward consistently and independently. Among these, one of the most common difficulties concerns unproductive team members.
\nTasks that move slowly, results that are late to arrive, and the need to step in again and again to get what was asked for: when this keeps happening, the problem is not just about the timing of a single task or a single person.
\nTo understand how to intervene in these cases, you first need to recognize how low productivity shows up and what real causes produce it. Only from that awareness can you identify the conditions that support higher productivity and understand how to make each team member's contribution more useful and consistent.
\nWhat is an unproductive team member?
\nIt's a team member who doesn't respond the way you would expect, shows little initiative, seems unmotivated and has to be prompted constantly.
\nFaced with this problem, one of the most common solutions is to increase presence and control, almost \"putting the spotlight\" on the team member, in the belief that closer supervision will push them to work harder.
\nBut is that really the solution?
\nThe problem of unproductive team members can be solved, but it doesn't depend solely on the team member. It also depends on what was done upstream by whoever runs the organization, by the manager or the business owner, and by the whole context people work in.
\nPeople's habits, in fact, also vary depending on the context in which they work. Habits can be shaped by the organizational context: so you need to ask whether the context people work in supports productivity or reduces it.
\nSo what are the characteristics of a context that supports productivity, and what are those that reduce it?
\nBefore answering, though, you need to clarify what being productive really means.
\nWhat does it mean to be productive?
\nDoes productive mean being effective, fast, efficient, working a lot? The answer completely changes the way the problem is interpreted.
\nIf you consider productive a person who responds quickly, for example, you might end up considering productive someone who replies immediately even at eight in the evening. If, instead, being productive means always having something to do, then a person who is constantly busy will be considered productive.
\nDepending on the definition you adopt, then, you get a different idea of productivity.
\nThat's why you need to define and share the meaning of the word \"productivity.\"
\nThe word productive comes from the Latin verb producere, made up of pro-, \"forward, out,\" and ducere, \"to lead, to guide.\" Its meaning therefore points to bringing something out of a resource: transforming a resource by bringing out its value.
\nThe resource can be anything you work on to make it fertile, that is, to transform it into something of greater value.
\nThis transformation has value, however, only when what is generated can be used and produces a benefit for the system.
\nProductivity therefore has little to do with busyness, with the number of activities performed or with simply being occupied. It's connected to the end result but, above all, to the quality of the product that is generated.
\n
A productive person transforms another person, a tool or an object into something different, with greater value.
\nBeing productive therefore means:
\nknowing how to transform the resources available, increasing their value so that they are useful and benefit the whole system.
\nProductivity thus implies making resources available, not accumulating them. Having earned a lot during the year, or having trained a lot and acquired a great deal of knowledge, doesn't necessarily mean being productive, because in these cases the benefit may remain limited to whoever accumulated that resource.
\nA productive person doesn't accumulate: they make things available.
\nFrom this perspective, being super productive means being super useful.
\nThat's why the word \"productive\" can be replaced with the word \"useful.\"
\nA team member should be rewarded when they are useful to their company.
\nYou can do without people who are fast or reliable, but you can't do without a useful person, because their usefulness is directly connected to the benefit they produce for the system.
\nInitiative must also be distinguished from productivity. Being proactive means doing something more, going beyond what was asked. But doing more doesn't necessarily mean being more useful: what is done in addition might not be aimed in the direction of usefulness.
\nIf productivity means usefulness, it then becomes necessary to understand which conditions determine whether a person can be useful within a system.
\nInvestigating whether usefulness is rising or falling is less of a priority than asking about the conditions for usefulness itself.
\nLooking at scientific research doesn't let you quantify how useful and productive companies are today: there are no independent public surveys on this. It does, however, let you identify which conditions the literature consistently associates with the ability to be useful within a system.
\nThe question to ask, then, is: which characteristics must necessarily be present for a person to be useful within a system?
\nFrom this question, two conditions emerge that ensure usefulness in an organization:
\nBut are these two conditions actually present in companies?
\nThe available data show that the first condition is far from guaranteed.
\nHow many employees clearly know what is expected of them has not been measured by independent public surveys: the most frequently cited time series on this indicator come from private polling firms and are not reported here.
\nWhat the scientific literature does document consistently is the effect of the opposite condition, role ambiguity: a worker's uncertainty about the responsibilities, expectations, goals, authority and behaviors associated with their role. [1]
\nMeta-analyses on the subject show that role ambiguity is consistently associated with lower satisfaction, lower commitment to the organization and higher tension, and that it weighs on job performance more than role conflict does. [1]
\nA meta-analysis of 33 studies and 19,926 people also found a significant relationship between role ambiguity and depressive symptoms (r = .279), concluding that providing clearly defined roles and goals may be a relevant factor for workers' health. [2]
\nAt the organizational level, the same literature records an association between role ambiguity, intention to leave the organization and actual departures. [1]
\nThese data therefore show how much clarity of role and expectations is a relevant condition for how a person functions within the organization.
\nThe second condition, on the other hand, concerns the habit of asking how you can be more useful.
\nHere too, the data show a difficulty.
\nStudies that analyze how companies collect and use information from customers, based on in-depth interviews and focus groups with managers and comparing the practices companies actually use with those prescribed by theory, show a substantial difference between having information on customer satisfaction and actually using it in business decision-making. [3]
\nThe same research shows that the practices actually in use differ substantially from those prescribed by theory, and that the biggest gap is not in collecting the data but in using it: in many cases measurement stops at collection and never goes on to change procedures or the product. [3] There is no independent public survey of how many companies are in this situation: the figures in circulation come from consulting firms and are not reported here.
\nMany companies, then, ask customers for feedback, but few have a systematic process for understanding how they could be more useful. [4]
\nThe principle is the same across the different relationships within a system: to know how to increase your usefulness, you need to gather information from those who benefit from the work you do.
\nA further point emerges from these data: if companies don't ask customers how to improve, it becomes even harder to expect team members to have the habit of asking the company how they can be more useful.
\nThis point is essential: already here an important difference emerges between asking, listening and improving. Having information doesn't necessarily mean using it to change what you do.
\nIn short, if the two conditions for being useful are not present in the system, the lack of usefulness does not remain without consequences: it produces effects that are reflected across the entire system.
\nWhat does having unproductive team members lead to?
\nA problem is recognized and quantified also by identifying the negative consequences it produces, directly or indirectly: identifying these consequences brings to light various critical issues in the system, including those you didn't think could be connected to it.
\nA company with unproductive team members is a company made up of people who, gradually, may come to feel not very useful. Feeling useless triggers very dangerous dynamics that generate effects for the whole company.
\nSome of these consequences are:
\nAt this point, moving toward the solution, you need to set the goal to pursue in order to solve the problem of team members' low productivity: define what a team member should ideally be like in the absence of the symptom.
\nWhat is the ideal condition to reach?
\nAnswering this question is essential before taking corrective action to solve the problem: if the direction is wrong, the solution will be too, and the result, achieved by working only on effects instead of on the causes of a problem, is neither stable nor permanent.
\nIn fact, the ideal condition is often, and mistakenly, defined as having more effective team members who perform well on their KPIs.
\nThis approach leads you to focus on effectiveness and on performance measured through indicators, but not necessarily on the usefulness the team member produces.
\nAnd, as shown above, only a useful team member can improve the system they work in (not an effective or high-performing one).
\nThe correct ideal condition to pursue to solve the problem of low productivity is therefore: having more useful team members.
\nA useful person adapts to what the system needs to achieve and has a flexible mindset about what needs to be done; that's exactly why they manage to increase the value of the system they are part of.
\nBeing a useful person has direct advantages not only for the system but for the individual: useful people don't have problems with work, neither in doing it nor in finding new work; an effective person, on the other hand, can still run into difficulties when their effectiveness is tied to a rigid way of dealing with the situations they face.
\nThe question then becomes: how can you make your team members more useful?
\nTo deal decisively with team members' low productivity, acting on the visible effect of a problem is not enough: you need to trace back to the process that produced it.
\nYou need to analyze the belief on which your understanding of the problem rests and the real causes that generated it.
\nEvery problem arises from a specific way of interpreting the situation. At its origin there is a belief, that is, an idea through which reality is observed, evaluated and defined as problematic.
\nIt's precisely this interpretation that guides how the problem is identified and where its origin is placed. As a result, when the starting point is an incorrect belief, the actions taken also risk targeting the wrong point, making it hard to reach a stable and permanent solution.
\nTo answer the question \"how can you make your team members more useful?\" you need to distinguish a wrong idea from a correct idea about productivity.
\nWrong idea: productivity is defined by results.
\nCorrect idea: productivity is defined by the (role's) stakeholder.
\nProductivity is measured in relation to the usefulness produced for the role's stakeholder.
\nThe key point this distinction makes possible is that productivity is not measured by effectiveness, and therefore by evaluating results through KPIs, but by evaluating the satisfaction of the role's customer/stakeholder based on how much and how you have been useful.
\nUsefulness implies that you are serving someone (the role's stakeholder), and serving someone always means being useful.
\nIt can happen that a team member didn't do what was asked or didn't produce exactly what was requested, but was, overall, much more useful (to their stakeholder and to the whole system). And this is far more important than having completed a task, having done it in less time, or with the highest rate of resource optimization.
\nIf a person is a salesperson, for example, productivity is not defined only by what and how much they sell, but by how useful they have been to the customer, to the production department, to their manager.
\nProductivity is not defined simply by what is produced or by the amount of results obtained, but by usefulness, by the value the stakeholder benefits from.
\n![\"Moving](\"/article-assets/gestire-collaboratori-poco-produttivi/gestire-collaboratori-poco-produttivi-da-poco-produttivo-a-utile.jpg\")
Having clarified the correct idea on which the solution to the problem must rest, you now need to investigate the causes that generated it.
\nAs with beliefs, the causes identified are not always the real and useful ones to act on, and working on the wrong causes leads to corrective actions that don't solve the problem for good.
\nThat's why it's essential to distinguish between the false causes and the true causes of team members' low productivity.
\nWhat is usually done to try to solve the problem of unproductive team members?
\nThe answer to this question also helps identify what is commonly believed to be the cause of the problem of having unproductive team members.
\nSo corrective actions that target the false causes of the problem (lack of visual oversight and lack of a measurement method) are solutions that don't address low productivity at its true origin.
\nWhat, then, are the real reasons the problem exists and persists?
\nTo apply corrective actions practically and permanently to the problem of team members' low productivity, you therefore need to act on the true causes of the problem by providing answers that make up for the gaps identified.
\nThe solution becomes the action that adds what is missing to fill the gap found through the analysis of the problem.
\nThe two causes identified therefore require two corresponding interventions: clarifying roles, functions and stakeholders, and creating a mechanism for gathering from stakeholders the information needed to increase usefulness.
\nHere are the two implementations needed to increase team members' productivity:
\nIt's the stakeholders who decide whether a person is productive or not and, above all, who indicate how that person can be useful.
\nWhen this distinction becomes clear, people start measuring themselves, without having to rely exclusively on KPIs, which risk reducing measurement to effectiveness.
\nProductivity, instead, is brought back to usefulness: not how busy a person is, how fast they are or how many indicators they manage to hit, but how much value they manage to make available to their stakeholders and, through them, to the whole system.
\nIn conclusion, an unproductive team member is not necessarily a person who works little, makes little effort or needs to be controlled more. The problem can arise from an unclear definition of what being productive means and, above all, of what makes the work done useful.
\nProductivity is not the same as speed, the number of activities performed or hitting a KPI. Being productive means transforming the resources available by increasing their value and making it available to the system. That's why usefulness can't be assessed in the abstract: it depends on the stakeholders each role must be useful to.
\nWhen roles, functions and stakeholders are clear, it becomes easier for every team member to understand what contribution they must generate and to check directly whether that contribution meets the system's needs. This way, productivity doesn't have to be imposed through constant control, but can become a responsibility that every person is able to measure starting from their own usefulness.
\nThe point, then, is not to have team members who are simply more efficient or busier, but people who can make their work available to the system in the most useful way possible.
\n[1] Jackson, S. E., & Schuler, R. S. (1985), A Meta-Analysis and Conceptual Critique of Research on Role Ambiguity and Role Conflict in Work Settings, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 36(1), 16-78 — https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(85)90020-2; Tubre, T. C., & Collins, J. M. (2000), Jackson and Schuler (1985) Revisited: A Meta-Analysis of the Relationships Between Role Ambiguity, Role Conflict, and Job Performance, Journal of Management, 26(1), 155-169 — https://doi.org/10.1177/014920630002600104
\n[2] Schmidt, S., Roesler, U., Kusserow, T., & Rau, R. (2014), Uncertainty in the workplace: Examining role ambiguity and role conflict, and their link to depression — a meta-analysis, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 23(1), 91-106 — https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2012.711523
\n[3] Morgan, N. A., Anderson, E. W., & Mittal, V. (2005), Understanding Firms' Customer Satisfaction Information Usage, Journal of Marketing, 69(3), 131-151 — https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.69.3.131.66359
\n[4] Griffin, A., & Hauser, J. R. (1993), The Voice of the Customer, Marketing Science, 12(1), 1-27 — https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.12.1.1
","headings":[{"level":2,"text":"The problem: unproductive team members","id":"the-problem-unproductive-team-members"},{"level":3,"text":"What productive really means","id":"what-productive-really-means"},{"level":3,"text":"What research says about the conditions needed to be useful in an organization","id":"what-research-says-about-the-conditions-needed-to-be-useful-in-an-organization"},{"level":2,"text":"The effects of low productivity in a system","id":"the-effects-of-low-productivity-in-a-system"},{"level":2,"text":"Effective or useful: the real goal for increasing the system's productivity","id":"effective-or-useful-the-real-goal-for-increasing-the-systems-productivity"},{"level":2,"text":"The mechanism for creating productive team members","id":"the-mechanism-for-creating-productive-team-members"},{"level":3,"text":"The false causes of team members' low productivity","id":"the-false-causes-of-team-members-low-productivity"},{"level":3,"text":"The true causes of team members' low productivity","id":"the-true-causes-of-team-members-low-productivity"},{"level":2,"text":"Practical tips to increase team members' productivity","id":"practical-tips-to-increase-team-members-productivity"},{"level":2,"text":"Sources and references","id":"sources-and-references"}],"tldr":"","tldrItems":null}