by Emma Jones
We are witnessing a growing contradiction in the way governments and businesses approach productivity. They are demanding more output, greater efficiency and better economic performance while making decisions that undermine the very workforce conditions that enable those outcomes.
Across workplaces, we're seeing redundancies, increasingly unrealistic workloads, people being pushed towards burnout, reduced flexibility and the erosion of investment in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). In the US, executive orders in 2025 triggered a significant backlash against DEI, with organisations retreating from commitments, programmes and investment.
And yet our governments are wringing their hands over the productivity crisis. Business leaders are looking for ways to squeeze more from existing workforces.
Here's what seems to be missing from the conversation: you cannot improve productivity by dismantling the conditions that make people productive.
The productivity problem we seem blind to
I recently watched a conversation between DEI expert Troy Roderick and Kylie Ingram from Wiser that literally stopped me in my tracks.
Troy said something that deserves far more attention:
"Productivity loss is actually a symptom of inclusion not occurring in your workplace."
Can we think about that for a moment?
What we're commonly seeing in organisations isn't necessarily a sudden drop in people's capability, nor simply the disruption of AI diffusion. It's people disengaging, opting out, withdrawing from proffering ideas, no longer speaking up and very quietly deciding that giving more of themselves just isn't worth the effort.
And by the time someone has mentally checked out, the problem has probably been building for months.
Yet leadership teams respond by trying to fix productivity. They look at output, efficiency, headcount and performance targets. They’re not stopping to ask what’s happening in the workplace that is causing people to pull back.
The productivity tax of exclusion
The evidence is pretty clear.
Diversity Council Australia's 2025–2026 Inclusion@Work Index found that employees in inclusive teams are 9.5 times more likely to report that their teams are innovative and 8.5 times more likely to report effective teamwork. They are also 2.5 times more likely to be willing to work extra hard to help their team succeed.
Gallup's extensive research into employee engagement reinforces the relationship between employee experience and business performance. Its meta-analysis, covering more than 3.35 million employees, found that business units in the highest engagement quartile recorded 18% higher sales productivity and 23% higher profitability than those in the lowest quartile.
But there's another dimension to this that deserves far greater attention: the productivity we lose when skilled people leave the workforce or are prevented from progressing.
In a recent submission to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics' inquiry into the use of technology to improve productivity, Project F highlighted Australia's significant loss of women from highly technical careers.
Women account for just 20% of Australia's highly technical workforce. Among workers aged over 40, that figure falls to 16%. Women leave highly technical roles after 40 at almost twice the rate of men.
Consider what that means. Australia invests in educating, training and developing highly skilled technology professionals, only to lose a substantial proportion of that capability just as people have accumulated significant experience.
This is talent wastage. And it absolutely is a productivity problem.
We're designing people out of productive careers
The problem isn't just that women leave. It's that many workplaces continue to be structured around an outdated model of the ideal worker: someone available full-time, continuously and often beyond conventional working hours.
WGEA's 2024–25 Gender Equality Scorecard found that 92% of managers work full-time, while only 7% work part-time.
At the same time, Australian research by economist Dr Leonora Risse found that 55.1% of women's total labour contribution is unpaid work and care, compared with 31.4% of men's.
These figures expose a fundamental mismatch between how work is designed and the realities of the workforce.
Economist Claudia Goldin describes these as "greedy jobs", where earnings and career progression disproportionately reward people who can provide long or unpredictable hours and extensive availability.
The consequences are not confined to gender equity. They include experienced people reducing their hours, declining promotions, moving into less demanding roles or leaving industries altogether.
Flexibility, equitable progression and inclusive leadership should therefore be understood as workforce infrastructure, not employee benefits.
Stop fixing people. Fix the system.
Troy Roderick shares an example of an organisation that invested heavily in a women's leadership programme, complete with executive mentors and senior sponsorship.
Participants returned more confident and capable, but the organisation itself hadn't changed. The same promotion processes, performance reviews, long-hours culture and decision-making dynamics remained.
Within two years, most of the women who had completed the programme had either plateaued or left.
The organisation had invested in developing its people without addressing the environment in which they were expected to perform.
This is where so much DEI investment falls short. We count training sessions, celebrate programmes and report participation numbers, but fail to examine whether recruitment, promotion, remuneration, work allocation, flexibility and decision-making practices have actually changed.
As Troy argues, we need to work inside the system, not around it.
Productivity and DEI are not competing priorities
If we're serious about Australia's productivity challenge, we need to broaden the conversation beyond technology adoption, skills shortages and workforce output.
We need to ask whether we're retaining the skills we already have, whether people can participate and progress throughout their careers, and whether our organisations are creating the conditions for their workforce to perform at its potential.
This is the argument Project F put to the Parliamentary Economics Committee: workforce equity, retention and utilisation should be recognised as integral to Australia's productivity agenda.
The opportunity isn't simply to get more women into technology. It's to stop unnecessarily losing the skilled people we already have and unlock more productive capacity from the workforce Australia has invested in developing.
We absolutely can’t keep demanding more from people while systematically removing the conditions that allow them to perform.
You cannot cut your way to productivity by cutting the conditions that create it.
Author: Emma Jones is the Founder and CEO of Project F, a social enterprise working to improve gender equity in the technology sector. She is the creator of the T-EDI Standards®, Australia’s first independent benchmark for gender equity in technology workplaces, developed in partnership with the Tech Council of Australia.
www.tedistandards.com.au