Satya Nadella on Microsoft's big problem: ‘85% employees feel overworked'

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella discussed a productivity paradox where 85% of managers believe employees are slacking, while 85% of employees feel overworked.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that his company is currently grappling with a "productivity" paradox owing to which most managers reported that employees have been slacking off work. On the contrary, employees claimed that they have been working too hard, the Microsoft boss said during a chat with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman as he highlighted that in situations like this, the company has to depend more and more on data.

Satya Nadella highlighted a productivity paradox at Microsoft, where managers think employees are slacking, while employees feel overworked. He stressed the importance of using data to address this discrepancy and recommended that leaders establish clear goals to improve workplace productivity. (AFP)

While addressing a question on flexibility in workplaces after the Covid pandemic and challenges of remote work, Satya Nadella said, “We looked at data pretty broadly across sectors and geographics and there are three findings that we are looking at, including ourselves at Microsoft. The first one is what we describe as this productivity paradox.”

He added, "Eighty-five percent of the managers think their employees are slacking off work, 85 percent of employees think they are working too hard and are burned off. And it's real data! So we have this paradox on how you can see these things in two different ways. And the only way around it to me is you have got to use data. Dogma is not going to help."

Satya Nadella further said that one of the ways to solve this would be for leaders to figure out how to have aligned goals because “as leaders, we have to learn how to bring clarity to what is the output that you'd like to see. What are the measures of it and then using that to see whether it is working or not and then create the norms.”