'85% Of Managers Think Their Employees Are...': Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella On Workplace Paradox

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the company is struggling with a "productivity paradox" where most managers reported that employees have been slacking off work. On the other hand, employees claimed that they have been working too hard. Nadella said that in circumstances like this the company has to depend more on data rather than dogma during a chat with Linkedin co-founder Reid Hoffman. “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”, Nadella said as he addressed a question on flexibility in workplaces after the pandemic and the challenges they bring by working from home.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."Further, Nadella stated that leaders need to understand how to provide clarity to what is the desired outcome, therefore one way to tackle this would be for them to figure out how to have aligned goals, the metrics for it and how to use those to determine whether it's effective or not before setting guidelines.