Rethinking productivity: recap from our roundtable

We recently brought together senior figures from across the world of work for a roundtable dinner at The Ivy Tower Bridge in London. The evening was hosted by our MD Rachel Houghton and drew guests from corporate real estate, property advisory, facilities management, construction, insurance, recruitment, and project and programme management.

The subject was productivity, and very early on it became clear that the people around the table did not all mean the same thing by the word. That difference of opinion led to a fascinating debate.

Why productivity is harder to measure than it looks

Organisations tend to measure what is easy to count: presence, cost, occupancy, completed tasks and time. The harder things, such as judgement, relationships, learning, attention and the quiet friction between teams, rarely fit a monthly dashboard, yet they are often where performance is won or lost.

There is a longer story behind the numbers, too. According to the Office for National Statistics, UK output per hour in the final quarter of 2025 was only 2.4% above its 2019 average, and the slowdown in national productivity began around the 2008 financial crisis, long before hybrid working existed. Where people work clearly matters, but it is not the whole explanation.

The impact (or not) of hybrid working and AI

Nobody argued that home working is always better, or that an office automatically makes people more productive, and for good reason. A randomised trial at Trip.com found that two home-working days a week did not damage measured performance and cut resignations by roughly a third, but the table was just as interested in what such figures cannot show, including culture, mentoring and long-term capability.

The topic of AI drew some of the strongest reactions. Research on generative AI has recorded meaningful productivity gains, particularly for less experienced workers. Yet the same tools raise difficult questions: who checks the answer, who owns the consequence in high-stakes fields such as medicine, law and recruitment, and what happens to the training ground where junior people have always built their judgement. If routine work disappears, the learning that came with it has to be replaced deliberately.

An office can be full and still achieve very little

One theme that ran throughout the evening was that activity is not the same as value. An occupied desk tells you someone is present, but not whether anything worthwhile happened while they were there. Different buildings do different jobs, and good coffee and design cannot repair weak leadership or an absence of purpose. The more useful question is not simply where people work, but whether an organisation is turning people’s time, capability and environment into something of genuine value.

A better question for leaders

Rather than settle on a single productivity score, the roundtable arrived at a way of thinking about productivity as a property of the whole system: purpose and outcomes, people and capability, process and governance, place, technology and data, and time and attention. The practical task for any leader is to find where friction is occurring, and to notice when improving one part of the system has quietly moved the cost, pressure or risk to another.

As the discussion concluded, productivity is not simply doing more. It is creating better outcomes without quietly moving the cost somewhere else. The question worth taking back to any business is no longer how productive our people are, but how effectively the organisation converts their time, capability, technology and environment into value.

Read the full discussion

The roundtable was bookended with two papers. The pre-read discussion paper sets out the evidence and the six tensions it creates, from hybrid working to the four-day week. The post-event report follows how the conversation unfolded on the night and shares suggested questions to take back to your business.

At BMG, we see what happens after a workplace decision has been made, from the carefully planned moves to the pressure placed on operational teams. That vantage point is why we convene conversations like this one, bringing industry leaders together to think honestly about work, workplaces and the future of work.

If you’re interested in attending a future roundtable, contact RHoughton@businessmoves.com.