Gartner HR Research Identifies Four Myths Hampering Employee Productivity

27 March 2025 — HR leaders must address four emerging myths around employee productivity that could impact their organisations' ability to achieve desired growth, according to Gartner, Inc.

A November 2024 survey of more than 450 CEOs and other senior executive business leaders revealed their most critical challenges to leading and growing their enterprise are talent and workforce (23%) and culture and people management (13%).

"With rising geopolitical and economic uncertainty making traditional growth plays, like market expansion, more challenging, CEOs are looking to employee productivity to fuel their growth ambitions in 2025 and beyond," said Aaron McEwan, Vice President, Advisory in the Gartner HR practice.

"However, HR leaders have long struggled to define, measure and impact productivity in any meaningful way. There are many myths surrounding what drives productivity, which cloud important debates like the role of AI and office mandates."

Gartner has identified a working measure of productivity for knowledge workers that significantly improves business outcomes, such as revenue, profitability and brand reputation. That is, employees doing quality work consistently and on time - employee efficiency - and employees devoting time and skills to work that is results oriented and focused on organisational priorities - employee value creation.

The four emerging productivity myths that HR must address to drive their organisations desired business outcomes include:

Myth 1: Productivity is not HR's job
A December 2024 Gartner survey of more than 1,900 managers of knowledge workers found that with direct HR involvement, employees can be up to 11% more productive.

"Employees, managers, and business leaders have very different, and sometimes contradictory, views on productivity," said McEwan. "HR can bring a unifying perspective and ensure that efforts are aligned."

The HR function must do four things to play an active partnership role in shaping productivity initiatives at their organisation: 
•    Include productivity in HR strategy to secure their seat at the table.
•    Identify collaboration opportunities for cross-functional productivity initiatives.
•    Articulate the talent tradeoffs of productivity initiatives to the C-suite.
•    Champion employee needs in productivity strategy.

Myth 2: Using AI equals quick productivity growth
While many leaders expect generative AI (GenAI) to be a growth and productivity driver, a December 2024 Gartner survey of more than 3,400 knowledge workers revealed only 8% of employees are fully capturing productivity gains by using GenAI tools often and experiencing both speed and quality improvements.

To achieve the desired productivity benefits of GenAI, HR must plug three productivity leaks: limited awareness, inconsistent adoption and ineffective use. To do so, HR must leverage its core competencies in change management, learning and development, and employee experience.

When an organisation addresses employees' awareness, adoption and use of GenAI, employees can be up to 8% more productive, and are 2.7 times as likely to experience speed and quality gains.

Myth 3: Onsite employees are more productive than hybrid employees
A December 2024 Gartner survey of 3,061 managers of knowledge workers found the same percentage of onsite employees and hybrid employees (21%) were ranked as highly productive.

"The data is clear: hybrid employees are equally as productive as onsite employees," said McEwan. "Productivity is about how we work, not where we work."

Gartner analysis of more than 100 work attributes revealed a supportive team culture has the greatest positive impact on the productivity of both hybrid and onsite employees, increasing employee productivity by up to 11%.

To create a supportive team culture that facilitates productivity, HR leaders need to do two things:
•    Enable managers to build team environments where discussions of productivity are used as a positive driving force for team initiatives
•    Encourage teams to decide their own core productivity values and ensure feedback is in-line with those ideals and associated behaviours

Myth 4: More data improves productivity
Organisations that rely too heavily on quantitative data to improve employee productivity can omit non-measurable and non-digital labour, inadvertently encourage employees to game the system and negatively impact employee engagement.

"Data is useful, but doesn't paint a complete picture," said McEwan. "It's important to also understand the context in which that data was collected. Gathering contextual information for a more focused set of metrics is almost twice as impactful as gathering more quantitative data on a variety of metrics."

HR can take two actions to ensure their productivity data comes with the needed context:
•    Involve those who know the work best in shaping productivity metrics. 
•    Include local perspectives in interpretation of productivity metrics.
According to Gartner, organisations that take action on all four emerging productivity myths can increase employee productivity by up to 35%, which translates into an individual employee working 2.8 more hours a day, generating more than $47,000+ in extra revenue annually.

Gartner clients can learn more in the on-demand webinar: "Maximising Employee Productivity: Debunking Emerging Productivity Myths."

About the Gartner HR Practice
The Gartner HR practice brings together the best relevant content approaches across Gartner to offer individual decision makers strategic business advice on the mission-critical priorities that cut across the HR function. Additional information is available at https://www.gartner.com/en/human-resources/products/gartner-for-hr. Follow news and updates from the Gartner HR practice on X and LinkedIn using #GartnerHR.

About Gartner
Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) delivers actionable, objective insight that drives smarter decisions and stronger performance on an organisation's mission-critical priorities. To learn more, visit gartner.com.