Downtime is a word that many people associate with unproductivity. If you are not actively working on something for the company, you are stealing money from the company. This is the premise behind the “lost productivity” articles that land every March discussing people who watch the tournament during the workday. This is the same premise that drives hysteria around employees checking Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube during the workday.
Giving people the opportunity to step away should be a design feature. No one can do their tasks non-stop for an entire day. We aren’t built that way. Everyone needs the opportunity to decompress, jump onto something else, or just generally step outside of their job.
The biggest reason for ensuring downtime is culture. It is during the times when people interact as individuals that your culture is best formed. Within the confines of required work, it is difficult to build trust and camaraderie. During downtime, people are able to form relationships that will drive productivity to an entirely new level.
In my experience, trust is one of the most significant drivers of productivity. When you trust the people you work with, it is easier to delegate and have a team collectively pull together results that individuals could never achieve. Trust does not necessarily mean that you are perfectly comfortable with a person, it means that for a given activity, you believe you know that they will do what they commit to and that you understand how they will deliver it.
This means that you have to trust that your employees may use Facebook some during the day but that they are still getting everything done that you expect otherwise. This means that you have to trust that you are not actually losing productivity because a basketball game is on – they are simply displacing the productivity in time.