Opinion: People are already working hard. The productivity problem is how much of that effort is being swallowed by meetings, reporting, approvals and other work that creates little value, argues The CEO Institute’s Richard Wynn
Productivity has moved firmly into the CEO’s office and is the top issue on their mind.
Across The CEO Institute’s members, productivity has become one of the most persistent issues raised by CEOs and business owners this year. It was a dominant theme at our CEO Summit in January and, more recently, emerged as the number one issue in our analysis of the challenges occupying members.
The reason is becoming clearer. Our 2026 The Pulse Report, based on responses from 798 CEOs and business owners across Australia and New Zealand, found leaders trying to do three things simultaneously. Growth and expansion was the top organisational priority for 42.6 per cent, followed by cost management and efficiency at 22.9 per cent, and innovation and digital transformation at 21.2 per cebr. Together, those priorities accounted for almost 87 per cent of responses.
CEOs are trying to grow, protect margins and transform their businesses at the same time.
But the productivity conversation is changing. Earlier discussions were often dominated by technology. Where should we deploy AI? What can we automate? How do we make better use of data?
Those questions still matter. But CEOs are now confronting a broader and more uncomfortable one: why, despite more technology, more data and people working harder than ever, does work still feel so difficult to get done?
The answer may be hiding in the work itself.
People are already working hard
There is a limit to how much harder we can ask people to work.
In many organisations, the problem is not a lack of effort. It is the amount of effort being consumed by work that creates too little value.
The meeting that did not need to happen. The report that gets produced but does not drive a decision of any significance. The approval process nobody can quite explain. The data entered into multiple systems. The project that keeps moving but never seems to land. The senior leader who spends hours preparing updates about the work instead of progressing the work.
Research released this month by EnterpriseWorks helps quantify the problem. Its ANZ workforce productivity research found that 83 per cent of respondents understand how their work connects to strategic priorities, yet only 51 per cent believe their organisation effectively organises work around its most important priorities. Another 42 per cent spend significant time creating manual reports and presentations, rising to 62 per cent among senior leaders.
That is a striking gap. People may understand where the organisation wants to go while still spending too much of their working week on activity that does not move it there.
None of these inefficiencies may appear catastrophic in isolation. Collectively, they create organisational drag. And because the business keeps moving, it is easy to mistake movement for progress, but being busy is not always productive.
AI will not fix broken work
AI represents an extraordinary opportunity. Used well, it can remove repetitive tasks, accelerate analysis, improve access to information and create capacity for higher-value work.
But AI is not a silver bullet.
EnterpriseWorks found that 71 per cent of active AI users said it reduced manual work. Yet only 48 per cent said AI tools were actively used by their team. That gap matters. Individual efficiency does not automatically become organisational productivity.
AI can also amplify whatever already exists. Introduce it into an organisation with clear priorities, connected data, well-designed workflows and capable people, and it can enhance performance. On the other hand, if you introduce it into an organisation with fragmented systems, unclear accountability, onerous processes and poor-quality data, it may simply embed unnecessary complexity.
Before asking where they should use AI, leaders should ask a more fundamental question: What work should exist in the first place?
Otherwise, we risk automating inefficiency rather than eliminating it.
There is no silver bullet. But there is a golden thread
Businesses commonly make three mistakes when responding to productivity pressure.
The first is treating productivity as a people problem and asking already stretched teams to do more. The second is treating it purely as a cost problem. Cost discipline matters, but a leaner organisation is not automatically a more productive one. Repeated restructuring can improve a short-term number while eroding capability, morale and the organisation’s ability to execute.
The third is treating productivity as a technology problem. Adding another platform to a fragmented operating environment can create another login, another notification and another source of data without improving the work.
There may be no silver bullet for productivity, but there is a golden thread: the work itself.
How work is designed. How priorities are set. How decisions are made. That is where the productivity opportunity sits.
Where have you normalised complexity?
In conversations with CEOs and business owners, some of the largest productivity problems are not hidden. They have simply become normalised.
One leadership team may spend hours each week creating reports for meetings where information is discussed but few decisions are made.
Elsewhere, another business may have invested heavily in technology, only to discover employees are manually moving information between systems that were meant to make work easier. And in other cases, a seemingly minor approval process may be repeated hundreds or thousands of times across an organisation, quietly consuming capacity every day.
The pattern is the same. People create workarounds. They add spreadsheets. They schedule another meeting to create alignment. They introduce another process to fix the process before it. Eventually, complexity becomes part of how the organisation works.
That is why one of the most important questions a CEO can ask is: Where have we normalised complexity that is making work harder than it needs to be?
The productivity solution is a human one
The future of productivity will undoubtedly involve AI, but people will determine whether organisations capture its full potential.
People need clarity about what matters. Managers need the capacity to lead rather than spend their days navigating administration. Teams need systems that support the work rather than interrupt it. Organisations need enough space to learn, adapt and build new capabilities.
This is where the productivity and people agendas converge.
The next productivity frontier is not how much more we can get out of people, but how much wasted work we can remove from their plates.
For CEOs looking for somewhere to begin, I would ask five questions:
- What work are our people doing that creates little or no value?
- Where does strategy lose clarity before it reaches day-to-day work?
- What complexity have we normalised that makes work harder than it needs to be?
- Where are technology and AI removing friction, and where are they adding to it?
- If we could redesign how work gets done today, what would we stop, simplify or change?
The answers will differ between a major enterprise, a scaling SME and a founder-led business. But the leadership challenge is the same.
Productivity affects growth, margins, competitiveness, workforce capacity and an organisation’s ability to capture the opportunities created by AI. That is why it is keeping CEOs awake at night.
Richard Wynn is the CEO of The CEO Institute
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