Managers Stop Promoting Toxic Productivity 

Productivity can easily be exploited at work. Managers may ask their team to stay late, work on weekends and prioritize work over personal commitments and other priorities in life. 

They may tell their team that they need to work harder, that they aren’t doing enough. They may tell them in order to be productive they need to spend more time at work. 

But productivity isn’t about the number of hours you put in, it’s about the outcomes you achieve. 

Staring at the screen for 20 mins and not being able to write a single line of code. 

Attending back to back useless meetings and then struggling to finish work late evening.

Working super hard and still worrying about falling behind. 

Personal time off is frowned upon and comes with a sense of guilt. 

If this is your team, beware! 

Your team may be working extra hard, but not getting the results you desire. A false notion that putting in more hours into work will produce better results can make you put unnecessary pressure and burden on your team. 

If you aren’t careful about how you communicate, collaborate and get work done, you may promote unproductive habits that will keep your team busy without achieving the desired outcomes. 

Toxic productivity—mindset to prioritize work to an unhealthy extent at the expense of mental health and personal well-being—can lead to burnout, stress, anxiety and a diminished sense of efficacy. 

Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year. When I look back on it, that’s what hustling was. It’s maximal effort put into minimal gain. It’s a hamster wheel. If I’d put all that energy into studying I’d have earned an MBA.
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime

Relentless performance can turn into an obsession with busyness—feeling the need to constantly do something, working long hours without taking breaks and ignoring the need to relax and rest.

Toxic productivity can lead to a downward spiral where your team feels compelled to work more to compensate for feelings of inadequacy. 

Being busy will not make your team successful, valuable or generate better outcomes. Stop equating long hours and overwork with commitment and success. 

Stop modeling unproductive behaviors 

People in your team look up to you on which behaviors are appreciated and which ones are looked down upon. 

When you model behaviors that convey relentless drive to work non stop, people in your team feel compelled to constantly work too, just to match up to your expectations or avoid being seen as incompetent or lazy. 

For example, you may say things like: 

Haven’t had the time to eat lunch today.

I was on calls this entire weekend. 

I have not taken a break since the last 4 hours.

I was working till late last night putting together our new hiring proposal. 

Saying such things does not make you a hero or make your team appreciate you for working so hard. Rather, it puts an unnecessary pressure on them to push themselves beyond their physical limits and mental capacity. 

Another way in which you may unconsciously promote such behaviors is by praising team members who work late or appear to be busy all the time, irrespective of their outcomes or the results they achieve. 

We are socialized into systems that cause us to conform and believe our worth is connected to how much we can produce. Our constant labor becomes a prison that allows us to be disembodied. We become easy for the systems to manipulate, disconnected from our power as divine beings and hopeless. We forget how to dream. This is how grind culture continues. We internalize the lies and in turn become agents of an unsustainable way of living.
— Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance

Stop glorifying the hustle mentality which promotes toxic productivity. Seek balance, not burnout. 

Encourage setting boundaries 

Boundaries are important for the personal and mental well-being of all employees at work. When these boundaries are exploited, productivity suffers and performance takes a dip. 

Someone who likes to hit the gym in the evening will be frustrated and annoyed if they have to skip it because of work commitments every other day. 

Someone who prefers having dinner with their family will be left feeling unfulfilled if they have to stay back late quite often. 

Someone who likes to hang out with friends over the weekend will be unhappy and unmotivated when asked to report to work on weekends.

Everyone has different priorities. But these priorities outside work matters. They shape our identity and define who we are as a person. Acting against our values or not acting inline with the person we wish to become can lead to pain and sorrow which can prevent us from focusing and doing our best work. 

A balance of work and personal goals makes working enjoyable and leads to a greater sense of fulfillment in life. It makes it possible to do more work in less time, leaving plenty of energy to focus on other important areas of life. 

Happy employees are not only more productive, the positive energy they radiate makes others around them adopt that attitude too. 

Unspoken boundaries are invisible, and they often sound like “They should’ve known better” or “Common sense would say . . .” Common sense is based on our own life experiences, however, and it isn’t the same for everyone. That’s why it’s essential to communicate and not assume that people are aware of our expectations in relationships. We must inform others of our limits and take responsibility for upholding them.
— Nedra Glover Tawwab, Set Boundaries

To encourage your team to define boundaries, ask these questions:

1. What is non-negotiable—things they won’t compromise on. These if not met will significantly impact their well-being.
2. What are some of the things they’re flexible about and willing to change if the situation demands it? 
3. What kind of responsibilities can they handle and what kind of tasks do not align with their goals?
4. What are their limits—ask them to be honest about what they can realistically achieve.

Boundaries not only give you a peek into your team’s personal life, it creates a distraction free environment to focus on work because they no longer need to worry about other parts of life. Respect boundaries, toxic productivity will no longer be a problem. 

Reduce over-meeting culture 

Meetings are important to align, collaborate, brainstorm and get meaningful work done. But they can also be a great time killer.

How many times have you heard your team saying:

Too many meetings. 

Couldn’t get anything done today.

I need to stay late because I didn’t get time to work during the day. 

Over meeting culture contributes to toxic productivity by eating up into time and effort—time that should be spent in doing real work. It is prevalent in organizations because managers not only end up spending all their time in meetings, they don’t take any steps to ensure their team isn’t following the same bad practices. 

Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization for one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.
— Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive

Think about this: how many meetings are your team members attending in a day:

1. Are they forced to attend meetings where they don’t learn anything or don’t create any value?
2. Do they call meetings for minor issues or small discussions which are better done over email or chat?
3. Do they attend meetings because it makes them look important?

Attending meetings without a clear intent is the biggest productivity killer. It’s time theft, a theft that managers are responsible for preventing.

Make workload manageable 

Toxic productivity creeps in when employees have too many things on their plate and too little time to finish them. 

Ad hoc requests, last minute changes, urgent bug fixes, production issues and many such things come unannounced. They not only disrupt a well planned schedule, taking them on without analyzing their impact on prior commitments creates a work backlog that ends up in toxic productivity. 

With deadlines close by and too much left to do, employees have no option but to work extra hours to make up for the lost time. They think that simply putting in more hours into work will help them catch up, but working long hours only slows them down and does not speed things up.  

In knowledge work, when you agree to a new commitment, be it a minor task or a large project, it brings with it a certain amount of ongoing administrative overhead. This overhead tax activates as soon as you take on a new responsibility. At moderate workloads, this effect might be frustrating: a general sense that completing your work is taking longer than it should. As your workload increases, however, the overhead tax you’re paying will eventually pass a tipping point, beyond which logistical efforts will devour so much of your schedule that you cannot complete old tasks fast enough to keep up with the new. Eventually the only solution becomes to push actual work into ad hoc sessions added after hours—in the evenings and early mornings, or over the weekend—in a desperate attempt to avoid a full collapse of all useful output. You’re as busy as you’ve ever been, and yet hardly get anything done.
— Cal Newport, Slow Productivity

There’s a difference between setting tough goals that pushes your team to excellence and being unreasonable about what they can achieve. Unrealistic workloads take a toll on mental well-being and hurt productivity.

Instead of leaving your team struggling with their workload, play an active role in helping them manage it. 

• Have regular sync ups to understand their workload and how confident they feel about achieving their goals.
• Discuss the challenges and strategies to keep moving forward.
• Identify changes to priorities, if any, to accommodate unplanned activities. 
• Empower them to say no to work that does not align with their goals. 

Schedules can’t be rigid. We all understand that. However, flexibility shouldn’t mean taking on more and more work without pushing something out. Negotiate hard with your stakeholders. Don’t succumb to all their demands. 

Promote incorporating breaks 

When we feel stuck—a hard problem with no solution in sight, piece of code that won’t work, not able to think creatively—we believe that pushing ourselves harder will help us get through an impasse. 

But the solution to clear the roadblock to the desired mental path isn’t to keep working, making the right connection in our brain requires taking a break. 

Forcing your team to work when they feel stuck isn’t productive. Making them sit for long hours does not lead to insight, it only decreases the likelihood of a solution striking or worse makes your team settle for a mediocre option. 

Not only does your team’s confidence and morale take a hit, you also have to live with a suboptimal decision. 

Making your team suffer mentally and physically by forcing them to work punishing hours does not make them reach their goals faster. Incorporating small breaks into their routine does. Healthy habits go a long way in setting up a team for success. 

When you get stuck, do something totally different for a few seconds. Then come back to the problem and see what happens. I predict you may notice how sometimes the prefrontal cortex, your conscious processing capacity, is itself the problem. Get it out of the way, and the solution appears.
— David Rock, Your Brain at Work

Getting up from our desks at regular intervals while working may seem like the most obvious thing to do. Yet, most people go on and on for long hours without taking a break. Lead by example. Promote healthy habits.

Summary

1. Managers who push their team to work long hours or always keep them on their toes turn productivity into toxicity which slows them down and does not help them achieve their goals. 
2. Your team watches what you say and do very closely. They establish what’s expected of them from not only the goals you set, but also what you say and do. Your words and actions convey silent expectations. Toxic work habits that you follow yourself will get passed to your team. To eliminate toxic productivity, set a good example for your team. Be a positive role model.
3. Your team has life outside work which matters as much. Pushing all personal priorities to the back burner to make more space and time for work can leave them feeling dissatisfied, unhappy, frustrated, angry and full of regrets. A balanced life increases productivity by removing distractions from negative emotions and unfulfilled dreams and desires. Kill toxic productivity by encouraging your team to set boundaries and ensuring those boundaries are respected.
4. Meetings suck time and energy when your team members don’t pay attention to which meetings are worth their time and which ones must be skipped. Packed calendars with unnecessary meetings leave less time to do work that matters. Eventually, they need to work late in the evenings and sometimes weekends to honor commitments made earlier. Minimize toxic productivity by coaching your team to limit time spent in meetings so that they have plenty of time during the day to work on important stuff. 
5. Irrespective of how well you plan initially, new things will show up during the execution phase. These additional changes, tasks or other requirements on top of an already packed workload can add tremendous pressure on the team. Don’t expect your team to accommodate everything without realigning and reshuffling priorities.  Unrealistic workloads aren’t sustainable in the long run. 
6. When your team faces obstacles and challenges along the way, do they tend to work punishing hours in desperate need of a solution? A tired mind and body can’t make brain connections to draw new insights or come up with creative solutions. Instead of pushing them in such moments, encourage them to take a break. Promote healthy habits. Discourage bad practices which hurts their productivity and compromises their mental well-being.

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