While some of our work is done alone, most of it involves working with others. When we work with others we cooperate, working together to achieve shared results. We commonly do this in the context of communications, meetings and projects, although we may cooperate in many other ad-hoc ways.

A good friend of mine is an experienced sailor who has competed in gruelling events such as the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race. He knows how to make a boat go fast, and he knows what slows a boat down.

He once told me a story of how a bucket attached to a rope fell overboard during a race, causing a sudden and almost immediate drag on the boat. Now, everyone on board that racing yacht would have known the drastic impact such an accident would have on their speed, and they wasted no time in cutting it loose.

Matt went on to tell me of a more insidious form of drag when sailing: the build-up of barnacles on a boat's hull produces an uneven surface that creates friction as the hull cuts through the water. In a race this kind of drag, being more gradual, can go unnoticed until it is too late. This is why some boat owners, especially of racing yachts, can spend thousands each year having their hulls cleaned, particularly before a race.

In the modern workplace, we face similar challenges. Sometimes someone will do something that completely disrupts our productivity. For instance, our priorities and schedule for the whole day may be upended because another department needs an issue resolved urgently.

But sometimes our productivity is disrupted in a more insidious way by a daily build-up of little things that affect our ability to work. These disruptions turn our work flow into work friction.

Few people set out to cause friction. Some might have little regard for other people's time, but most of us do our best to get our work done, and the friction we cause is simply the collateral damage of our busyness. This friction is a major productivity drain, however, and when compounded across the team, quickly adds up.

Productivity friction

So what does friction look like? And how can we turn it into flow?

Friction is the loss of productivity and effectiveness that occurs in the ‘gap' between two people, as illustrated in figure 1.1. It is that brief loss of focus when we are distracted by an interruption. It is the wasted time spent in a meeting that has no agenda and no real focus. It is the frustration we feel when an urgent request derails our day and the priorities we had planned. It is the sense of overwhelm we feel every time we open our inbox to find hundreds of new messages waiting for our attention.

None of these issues are major problems in themselves, but over days and weeks they add up to create a friction that makes our work harder than it needs to be.

Poor productivity behaviours

In a team where friction rules, you will find the following behaviours affecting the productivity of all concerned:

Meetings

• Participants turn up late to meetings.
• Participants arrive unprepared.
• The wrong people are invited.
• They fail to follow through on agreed actions.
• Meetings are called at short notice.
• Meeting agendas and outcomes are fuzzy.

Emails

• We send too many emails.
• Our communications are not expressed clearly.
• The desired actions are buried in the body.
• We copy people into the email unnecessarily.
• We write fuzzy subject lines.
• Every email is marked ‘urgent'.

Delegation

• We choose the wrong people for the job.
• We delegate at the last minute.
• We don't take the time to delegate well.
• We delegate all responsibility but no power.
• We micromanage the delegation.
• We don't provide enough support when needed.

Interruptions

• We make too many interruptions.
• We show a lack of awareness and empathy.
• We interrupt just because we have a thought.
• We make negotiation hard for the other person.
• We make every interruption an urgent issue.

Deadlines

• We leave work tasks until the last minute.
• We create unnecessary urgency.
• We expect instant responses.
• We forget or fail to meet deadlines.

All of these examples of poor productivity behaviour cause friction, not just between two individuals, but across the team.

If we do not manage it, friction will pile on top of friction. What if we could reduce the friction that occurs when we work with others? We probably cannot totally eradicate it, but if we reduced it just a little in every interaction, and we did this across our whole team, the productivity gain would be huge.

In his book Will It Make the Boat Go Faster?, British rower Ben Hunt-Davis talks about ‘the aggregation of marginal gains', a concept he learned from the British Cycling performance director David Brailsford. This idea suggests that 1 per cent improvements in different areas such as training, diet and aerodynamics would aggregate to a massive overall performance improvement.

If we were to reduce the productivity friction in many areas of our work, such as our emails, our meetings and our project collaborations, we would enjoy a massive increase in productivity. And if we did this consistently across the team, we would create a more productive culture — a culture where flow was the norm.

Friction vs flow cultures

Running through my son's recent end-of-term report, I noticed he was marked as late on several days over the term. For me this was unacceptable. His response was, ‘But Dad, all my friends are late more often than I am!' In my head, I recalled much the same conversation with my own parents, and my reply to my son was very similar to theirs: ‘I don't care what your friends do. This is my expectation of you …'

In the workplace, our productivity behaviours cannot be measured against the group norm. Just because most people are late to meetings does not make it okay. We need to measure ourselves against a higher standard, one that is not diminished by group behaviours.

The culture of a team is partly dictated by the behaviours and habits of the individuals in that team. In a friction culture, poor productivity behaviours across the team cause disruption rather than collaboration. The common feeling is of ‘busyness'.

In a flow culture, on the other hand, people don't talk about how busy they are. We are all busy. Move on. They instead talk about how productive they are, even if their schedule is full. (When people ask me if I am busy at the moment, I now refuse to say ‘yes,' replying instead, ‘No, my schedule is productively full.' This is not just about positive spin. It is about mindset.)

Many friction cultures feel like they are always short on resources. There is much talk about how short-staffed we are, how we have too much to do and not enough time, so we can't get anything done. Sound familiar?

In flow cultures, we not only use our time more effectively because we are organised, focused and proactive, but we get more done because we are resourceful. We find a way. We work it out. We are in control of getting what is important done on time.

How do we move from a friction culture to a flow culture?

Beyond personal productivity

Increased productivity, especially sustained increased productivity, does not just happen by itself. Productivity must be led by leaders who make it a priority, and who passionately lead by example so their team model their way of working.

For greatest impact and leverage, leaders and managers at all levels in the business should put the productivity of their team on the agenda, and make it a personal priority to support and lead the productivity effort.

Cultures are formed around a set of principles and behaviours that are modelled by everyone, starting with the leadership team. If your work style is reactive, disorganised and chaotic, the culture of your organisation will mirror this.

Over the past 15 years I have worked in many organisations, helping individuals and teams to improve their personal productivity. I am passionate about this work but have been frustrated at times by how great training and coaching can be undone by the culture of an organisation.

I believe that this applies especially to productivity training. Individuals come back from a training day fired up, excited about the potential of their new learnings, and ready to change the habits of a lifetime. But for all their efforts to work more proactively, the reactive culture they work in drags them back into firefighter mode, reacting to urgency and putting out fires.

For all their desire to get to the impactful work in their role, their time is squandered dealing with operational issues, often caused by someone else's poor work practices or lack of planning. Even with the best intentions to create space for the important work, their time is taken up with endless meetings and a deluge of emails.

Research by Bain & Company has confirmed how culture can work against the good intentions of workers and teams. One report on large organisations found the problem to be cultural as much as systemic, with the corporate culture tending to siphon resources away from externally focused, customer-serving tasks. The report noted:

Most time management advice focuses on individual actions — be choosy with meetings, rein in your email box. But this advice sometimes goes against your company's culture: Ignore emails and meeting invitations and you risk alienating your colleagues — or your boss.

Figure 1.2 (overleaf) outlines the different productivity cultures that can exist, and what needs to happen for an organisation to move up the ladder from disruptive to superproductive.

Level 1: DISRUPTIVE

Many leadership teams talk about the importance of productivity in the organisation, yet the truth is they are sometimes a part of the problem. While they may have the best interests of staff at heart, sometimes the ever-changing environment and the constant pressure to achieve results lead to behaviours that have a negative effect on productivity. This can lead to a reactive culture with fuzzy priorities and little support to help people to work in a productive way.

If this is the culture in which we work, we need to raise awareness and set some expectations about how the team could operate to ensure maximum productivity. This is especially critical at the leadership level, as poor productivity behaviours can have a doubly negative effect. If the leadership team's mindset is off, you can expect that their teams will adopt a similar mindset. As the comedian Eddie Murphy used to observe, ‘Follow a stupid kid home, and I bet your bottom dollar you will find stupid parents.'

Level 2: PASSIVE

In some organisations, a passive culture predominates. The leadership team may not be causing the productivity issues, but they also may not be doing enough to protect their teams from them. They may ignore the need to work on productivity, and believe they can get by using outdated methods and cobbled-together organising systems.

They may still use obsolete tools to organise themselves, and personally resist the adoption of technology to boost productivity. Perhaps they see the benefit for others but convince themselves that they don't need to change and are operating just fine with the toolkit they have built for themselves over the years.

The key to reaching the next level is to make productivity a priority, and to take steps to upgrade the personal productivity skills of everyone in the team. This is where personal productivity training comes in, and it is this training that makes up much of the work I have done historically with my clients. But, as we will discuss, personal productivity training fixes only part of the productivity problem.

Level 3: PRODUCTIVE

At the productive level, leadership may have invested time and money to develop the skills of the team and achieve enhanced productivity. But here is the real challenge, and the real opportunity. If we stop here, as I believe most organisations do, the productivity gain may be limited, as the efficiencies gained by the individual are offset by the friction caused by our co-workers.

So the next focus needs to be on agreeing on and embracing a set of productivity principles that, when adopted by the team, serve to enhance team productivity. When we operate according to a set of agreed behaviours every time we communicate, congregate and collaborate, our collective productivity cannot help but increase. This reduces friction and increases flow.

Level 4: COLLABORATIVE

For the organisation that goes from productive to collaborative, work will flow, with the effectiveness of the team increasing in a highly leveraged way. The sum is greater than the parts.

But adopting a set of agreed protocols can generate an initial flurry of excitement and action that soon recedes as we fall back into our old habits. They become posters on the wall that we don't even notice anymore. If this happens, the productivity gain at the collaboration level can be short-lived. The final focus on the journey to creating a superproductive organisation requires a long-term change in culture.

We need leaders at all levels to step up and champion this new way of working to achieve sustained productivity. If we stick with it, the culture will change for the better, and over time even new starters will quickly begin to operate productively in their new superproductive workplace.

Level 5: SUPERPRODUCTIVE

Superconductors, like those used in MRI machines, operate at extremely low temperatures and can reduce the energy lost to resistance enormously. In fact, a current in a superconducting circuit can theoretically travel around the circuit for decades without loss of power. The lack of resistance ensures the purity of the energy.

Similarly, a superproductive culture can experience a sustained increase in productivity across the team or organisation, and will ensure the energy of the workers is maximised. Everyone works in a way that is personally productive, but also productive for those around them. And the culture ensures that these mindsets become a part of the DNA of the organisation.

A superproductive organisation not only experiences very high levels of productivity across the team, but ensures this productivity gain is sustained over time, even when members of the team leave and new members join. Superproductive becomes ‘the way we work around here'.

Imagine a culture in which everyone is highly skilled at managing their time and priorities.

Imagine a culture in which people actively work to enhance their own productivity as well as the productivity of others.

Imagine a culture in which productivity is embedded in the DNA of the organisation.

So how do we move to this ultimate level of productivity? How do we inspire a culture that will allow productivity to flourish? Let us look at the pathway to reducing friction and enabling productive flow.