“How can we make our people more productive?”
It sounds like a reasonable question.
And in Australia, it is becoming an increasingly important one.
Productivity has become a major part of the national conversation about economic growth, wages and living standards. Recent figures from the Australian Productivity Commission show just how challenging the picture has become: labour productivity fell by 0.6% in the March 2026 quarter and grew by only 0.3% over the year, while hours worked continued to rise.
In other words, we’re spending more time working without necessarily producing proportionately more.
So perhaps there is another question worth asking:
What if our people aren’t actually the productivity problem?
Think About an Ordinary Workday
Imagine someone starts their morning ready to get things done.
Before they can begin their first task, they need information from another team. They send a message and wait.
While waiting, they join a meeting that could probably have been an email. Afterwards, they spend 15 minutes looking for a document because there are three versions saved in different places.
They finally start their task, only to discover they need an approval.
Another wait.
Later that afternoon, they manually update a spreadsheet with information that already exists in another system.
By the end of the day, they’ve been busy for eight hours.
But how much of that time was actually productive?
This is where our understanding of productivity can become complicated.
We often measure what employees produce, but don’t always look closely enough at what employees have to go through in order to produce it.
Sometimes, Work Gets in the Way of Work
Productivity isn’t simply about how quickly someone completes a task.
It’s also influenced by the environment we’ve built around that task.
Unclear responsibilities create unnecessary conversations. Too many approval layers create waiting time. Poor systems create manual work. Too many meetings reduce focus time. Unclear priorities cause employees to constantly switch between competing demands.
None of these necessarily appear on a performance dashboard.
But employees experience them every day.
And when these small inefficiencies happen across dozens, hundreds or thousands of employees, they stop being small.
They become an organisational productivity problem.
But Individual Performance Still Matters
None of this means individual accountability should disappear from the productivity conversation.
There will always be situations where performance is genuinely the issue.
People need clear expectations. Employees need the right capability for their roles. Managers need to address underperformance when it occurs, and individuals should be accountable for the commitments and outcomes expected of them.
But there’s an important distinction.
Is someone struggling to perform because they can’t or won’t deliver — or because the organisation has made delivering unnecessarily difficult?
Those are very different problems, and they require very different responses.
One might require coaching, capability development or performance management.
The other might require us to fix the process.
Good performance management should be able to tell the difference.
AI Won’t Automatically Fix It Either
Technology and AI offer enormous opportunities to improve productivity, and Australian businesses are understandably exploring how they can help people work more efficiently.
But introducing technology into an inefficient process doesn’t necessarily make the process efficient.
Sometimes, it simply makes the inefficiency digital.
Before asking, “Can we automate this?”, perhaps we should first ask:
“Why are we doing this in the first place?”
A five-step process automated into five faster steps may be an improvement.
Removing three unnecessary steps could be a much bigger one.
Productivity Is Also a People Experience
This is where People & Culture has an important role to play.
Employee experience and productivity are often discussed separately, but they’re more connected than we might think.
Think about the frustration of repeatedly chasing approvals.
Or having to enter the same information into multiple systems.
Or attending meetings where your presence isn’t really necessary.
Or being held accountable for an outcome when you don’t have the authority to make the decisions needed to achieve it.
Individually, these might seem like minor inconveniences.
Repeated every week, they become frustration.
Repeated for months, they can become disengagement.
And eventually, we may describe someone as “less productive” without recognising that the way we’ve designed their work has made productivity unnecessarily difficult.
Perhaps Productivity Starts With Removing Friction
Australia’s productivity challenge is much bigger than what happens inside any single workplace. It involves investment, technology, skills, competition, regulation and many other factors.
But organisations don’t have to wait for the national productivity problem to be solved before looking at their own.
Some productivity improvements can start much closer to home.
Instead of always asking:
“How can we get more productivity from our people?”
We could also ask:
“What is getting in the way of our people being productive?”
That small change in language shifts the conversation.
It doesn’t remove accountability from employees. Instead, it creates accountability on both sides.
Employees remain accountable for their performance.
Leaders remain accountable for creating an environment where good performance is possible.
Are responsibilities clear?
Do people have the authority they need?
Are our processes still relevant?
Are meetings adding value?
Are our systems helping people or creating additional work?
Are we measuring outcomes that actually matter?
And perhaps most importantly:
“If we removed one unnecessary thing from someone’s work tomorrow, what would it be?”
That question could tell us more about productivity than another dashboard ever will.
Because sometimes improving productivity isn’t about asking people to work harder, faster or longer.
It’s about removing the things that stop them from doing the work that actually matters.
Source
Productivity Commission, Quarterly productivity bulletin – June 2026. View the official Productivity Commission bulletin
