'85% of employees feel overworked,' says CEO Satya Nadella on Microsoft’s problem

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella referred to a productivity paradox where 85% of managers think employees are drained, while at the same time 85% of employees feel drained.

According to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, his company is in the midst of a productivity paradox. Most managers’ survey suggested workers were slacking off. Whereas, employees stated that they had been working too hard, according to Nadella during a conversation with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who highlighted that in cases like these, the organization must rely increasingly on data.

While answering a question about workplace flexibility in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the problems of working from home, Nadella stated that they looked at data pretty broadly across sectors and geographies, and there are three findings that they are looking at, including themselves at Microsoft. The first one is what they call the productivity paradox.

85% of managers think their employees are slacking off work, whereas 85% of employees believe they are working too hard and are exhausted. So, they have this paradox in which management view things in two different ways, and Nadella believes the only way out is to use data.

Managers should set goals that are consistent and with measures of performance being clear to overcome this problem. Microsoft has seen the light and has even made it a company policy as they discovered that segmenting work into defined chunks instead of being done in one go has actually improved job quality and productivity.