"Productivity is hard to measure. We knew this going in. But it's only getting harder, because more and more of the economy is shifting into that squishy, soft, intangible knowledge-based world."
We had a productivity measurement problem even before the pandemic. Classically-defined productivity is measured in the ways we always do it...basically, it's an output/input thing, and there's some measure of wealth. We have these debates about how you measure services, creative work, knowledge work, because the metrics are a lot squishier.
I think one of the big problems is applying old "Taylorite" measures by default to knowledge work and creative work. We've learned we can do remarkable things without having to be in the office measuring you by how many hours you put in. And yet, a lot of leaders still default to, "Who's here late? Who got in early? Whose key card shows what they did?"
One of the lessons we've learned from the pandemic is if we were moving toward flexibility before, human-centered productivity has to allow for massively more flexibility than the old model. If (employees) aren't able to flex to deal with what they need to, then your productivity is being mismeasured.