What can we learn from X?
Consider Elon Musk’s decision to cut more than 50% of the workforce at X (formerly Twitter). At the time, many predicted the platform’s collapse. Yet despite some glitches, that has not come to pass — so how much of what we do is truly essential and productive?
It is clearly a polarizing example, but it underscores one important fact for many large organizations: We can operate leaner and more effectively. We can accomplish more if we strip away the superficial busyness that often adds no value.
Going back to the basics
With so much economic burden tied to inefficiency, it’s time to give equal focus to how we work compared to how much we work. Here’s how to do it:
- Quantify the burden: Leverage Gen AI to evaluate the real value of meetings, emails and the plethora of communication and collaboration tools we have at our disposal. AI can summarize the conclusions of each meeting and identify action items in emails and messages. Using analytics, we can also identify the productive meetings and effective communication channels and eliminate those that aren’t serving a clear purpose.
- Take drastic measures: Introduce meeting-free days or meeting quotas for teams. One huge source of waste is meeting invites that are forwarded to non-essential attendees without approval from the organizer. Believe it or not, Copilot will help us streamline meetings by uninviting those who don’t actively contribute. It hasn’t been rolled out yet, but it’s coming!
- Empower competent managers: Hire and reward managers who understand the business, lead with purpose, and prioritize impact. They will help you build and sustain the right kind of culture – one built around outcomes and business impact.
- Revamp reward systems: It’s time to stop rewarding presence and start rewarding outcomes. Instead, we should be recognizing, celebrating and incentivizing impactful work to create and sustain an output-driven culture.
- Measure what matters: Shift from measuring individual productivity to evaluating business process-level outcomes, with CSAT (customer satisfaction) as the guiding metric. Gen AI can help identify positive outcomes and customer sentiment to quantify and track the impact that employees are making.
Final thoughts
I hope you don’t conclude from this article that Gen AI is making us all less effective by creating more busy work. Quite the contrary — Gen AI is transformational, but it’s just a tool. It is great at automating repetitive tasks, analyzing inefficiencies and enabling asynchronous collaboration. But like any tool, it can be misused or put to the wrong purposes.
My main point is that without making certain cultural shifts, we risk falling into the “zero-sum game” trap. Gen AI is a powerful productivity tool, but its gains can easily be nullified by outdated, entrenched work habits.
Posted on: January 9, 2025
