Wally Bock, whom I've cited many times before, has another great post on his Three Star Leadership blog this week.  Questioning the validity of the perennial stock of studies finding that employees waste "several bazillion dollars" each year during time they should be working, he urges business leaders to

Just throw away your notions that you can get 100 percent productivity.  It's not human.  It's not natural.  It won't work.

As Bock acknowledges, this is not to say that leaders shouldn't keep their eye on the productivity ball, through everything from MBWA to ROWE to Six Sigma.  But achieving total productivity is indeed a fallacy.

Leaders should just aim to create a more productive workplace every day.  They should take a cue from Google, which pioneered the practice (now a trend) of allowing workers a full 20% of their time to explore personal, creative interests.

This may seem counterintuitive to some, but the bottom line is that approaches like this have been shown to improve employee engagement and retention over the long term because they help convince workers that their employers care about them as a whole person, not just as a business asset.  We explored this with some depth when we profiled the employee leadership development practices at Best Boss Mike Faith's firm Headsets.com.

Photo credit: TrekEarth/lucinka