Productivity conversations usually start with people and end with targets. That framing assumes the constraint sits with individual effort. In most growing organisations, the constraint sits between roles — in handoffs, waiting time, rework and the effort required to find reliable information.
A useful diagnostic is to trace a single unit of work from entry to completion and mark every point where it stops, changes hands, or is re-entered into another format. The cumulative time spent at those points is frequently larger than the time spent on the work itself.
Treating productivity as a system question changes the intervention. Instead of monitoring output more closely, the organisation reduces the number of transitions, defines ownership at each stage, and makes status visible without anyone needing to ask.
This is also more durable. Supervision-based productivity gains decay when attention moves elsewhere. Structural gains persist because they are built into how the work moves.