The Importance of Relational Productivity

Commentary on recent BCG article, "The Social Economics of Work and Productivity"

The future of work is going well beyond facilitating hybrid home and office working arrangements and is clearing the way for far-reaching changes in human labor while changing old social contracts with workers. BCG suggests it is ‘relational productivity’ that explains the hidden economic effects and boost in performance resulting from people and groups working together remotely during the pandemic.

Collaboration, knowledge diffusion, and the ability to work autonomously flourished during recent lockdowns. While the advantages and shortcomings of collaborative technologies became evident, managers and employees focused on connectedness, which in turn uncovered the critical importance of relational productivity.

In this excellent piece, Yves Morieux and Diana Dosik explain three complementarities that underlie relational productivity: vertical (manager to employee), horizontal (employee to employee), and radial (employee to the organization). The term ‘complementarity’ refers to how one factor increases the value of another. The pandemic revealed the importance of these three relational complementarities and how they combined to improve leadership, cooperation, and engagement - and, consequently, productivity - in remarkable ways.