How CEOs are redesigning work, decision-making and capability for the next era of performance
For many CEOs, productivity has moved from an economic talking point to an operating reality.
Margins are tighter. Labour costs remain elevated. Customers still expect more, faster. And across sectors, leaders are being asked to deliver growth without simply adding cost, complexity or headcount.
That is why productivity is back in the boardroom. But the most effective CEOs are not responding by asking people to work harder. They are asking a better question:
How should work be designed now?
That shift matters. Because in most organisations, productivity drag does not come from a lack of effort. It comes from friction. Too many meetings. Too many handoffs. Slow decisions. Duplicate systems. Unclear ownership. Reporting that creates activity without insight. Technology layered on top of broken processes.
In other words, productivity is usually a systems issue before it becomes a people issue.
That is also why this moment feels more urgent than previous productivity debates. As recent commentary in the Australian Financial Review argued, Australia is “running out of time to change course”, with business leaders warning that a more disruptive AI-led operating environment is approaching fast.
For CEOs, the implication is clear: this is not the time for incremental tinkering around the edges. It is the time to redesign how the organisation creates value.
Stop measuring effort. Start measuring flow.
One of the biggest productivity traps in leadership teams is confusing visible effort with meaningful output.
Busy calendars can look like commitment. Large volumes of reporting can look like control. Constant internal activity can feel like momentum. But none of those things guarantee progress.
High-performing CEOs are increasingly focusing less on how busy teams are, and more on how work flows across the business. Where does work stall? Where do approvals stack up? Where do teams wait for decisions? Where do priorities collide? Where is time being spent on coordination rather than value creation?
That lens is far more useful than broad conversations about whether people are “productive enough”.
Because the truth is simple: if your best people are spending too much of their time navigating internal complexity, your organisation has a design problem.
The silent killer of productivity: decision friction
In many businesses, the greatest productivity loss is not in frontline execution. It is in leadership architecture.
Decision rights are unclear. Escalation points are too high. Cross-functional dependencies are poorly defined. Leaders hold onto approvals that should sit lower in the business. Meetings multiply because nobody is certain who can decide.
The result is a business that looks busy but moves slowly.
This is where CEOs can have disproportionate impact. Not by joining more reviews, but by simplifying who decides what, clarifying ownership, and reducing the organisational tax that complexity places on execution.
The strongest operating models are not always the most sophisticated. Often, they are the clearest.
AI will not fix broken work
AI is now part of almost every productivity conversation, and rightly so. But leaders should be careful not to mistake tool adoption for transformation.
Used well, AI can remove low-value work, accelerate knowledge access, improve service, reduce admin, and free capable people to spend more time on judgement, customers and growth. Used poorly, it simply allows organisations to automate noise.
That is why some of the more useful commentary emerging from large enterprises is not about AI replacing people, but about redesigning roles around higher-value contribution. In recent reporting, Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn argued that individual uptake of AI will be critical to maintaining competitiveness, while also signalling that future roles will require greater expertise, judgement, critical thinking and empathy.
That distinction is important.
The goal is not to deploy AI for the sake of appearing modern. The goal is to remove work that should never have required human talent in the first place.
As Michael Abbott of Accenture put it in the same coverage, the best companies are not thinking about AI purely as efficiency. They are redesigning how work gets done, with productivity emerging as an outcome.
That is the real opportunity for CEOs: not just implementing tools, but rethinking workflows, capabilities and value creation around them.
Productivity gains will come from redeployment, not just reduction
Another message coming through strongly in recent research is that organisations leading this shift are not treating productivity as a blunt cost-out exercise.
They are moving people into more valuable work.
CBA’s recent approach is a useful example. Alongside broader AI adoption, the bank has emphasised retraining, internal mobility and structured capability building so staff can move into higher-value roles as work changes. In the past year, it reported that 5,000 employees had moved into new jobs within the organisation.
Whether or not that model is directly transferable to every business, the principle is highly relevant: productivity improvement becomes more sustainable when it is tied to capability uplift, not just workforce compression.
That is especially true for founder-led and growth businesses. If every productivity initiative is experienced by teams as a threat, adoption slows, trust drops and change fatigue rises. But when leaders can show that simplification, automation and AI create space for better work, not just less work, resistance tends to soften.
Responsible adoption is now part of the productivity equation
There is another reason CEOs must take a design-led approach: trust.
If AI and automation are going to reshape work, then governance, transparency and capability cannot sit behind the strategy. They must sit inside it.
Recent CBA reporting provides a useful benchmark here. Its public update on responsible AI adoption highlighted governance forums, formal AI principles, practical support for teams, and broad internal learning efforts, including more than 27,600 employees engaging with its AI learning series by the end of 2025.
The lesson for CEOs is not that every organisation needs enterprise-scale governance. It is that productivity gains built on technology are only durable when leaders build confidence alongside capability.
People need to understand what is changing, why it is changing, where judgement still matters, and what responsible use looks like.
Without that, even promising technology can become another source of organisational drag.
The CEO’s role is to remove friction at the system level
The most productive organisations of the next few years are unlikely to be those with the most tools, the most dashboards or the most activity.
They will be the ones whose leaders are disciplined enough to remove friction.
That means simplifying decision pathways. Resetting meeting rhythms. Stripping out duplicate reporting. Clarifying role accountability. Redesigning work around outcomes. Investing in capability before urgency forces the issue. And using AI to eliminate low-value effort, not to mask structural inefficiency.
This is where productivity becomes a leadership issue, not just an operational one.
Because every business eventually becomes shaped by what its leaders tolerate. If complexity is tolerated, complexity compounds. If delay is tolerated, delay becomes cultural. If teams are rewarded for busyness rather than outcomes, busyness becomes the operating system.
The reverse is also true. When CEOs insist on clarity, speed, simplicity and better work design, productivity follows.
The real productivity imperative
The broader national productivity conversation matters. Recent business commentary has argued that even lifting productivity growth from 0.7 per cent to 1.7 per cent could materially improve living standards over time.
But for CEOs, the more immediate question is not what happens at the macro level.
It is this:
Where is work inside our business harder, slower and more expensive than it should be?
Answer that honestly, and productivity becomes less abstract.
It becomes a design challenge. A leadership challenge. And, for those prepared to act, a competitive advantage.
