There has been much written about productivity recently, and specifically its decline in the Western world (and particularly in the UK).
From <https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/productivity>
Now, I am aware of my limitations here: I am a lowly information guy, for whom the Phillips Curve is what I get when I bend my cross thread screwdriver in a frantic attempt to put up a shelf. So I'm not wading into the more academic arguments, but attempting to recast the question.
For most people, productivity is all about getting more output from a given set of inputs. Indeed, most formal definitions are precisely that. However, I'm not sure that's so helpful in this digital age when so much value is intangible. To illustrate this, the following chart caught my eye:
From <https://hbr.org/2015/08/productivity-is-soaring-at-top-firms-and-sluggish-everywhere-else>
How does the Harvard Business Review define a "frontier" firm? "The strength of global frontier firms lies in their capacity to innovate, which increasingly requires more than just investing in R&D and implementing technology. It requires the capacity to combine technological, organizational, and human capital improvements, globally".
The important phrase is the first one, in my opinion: their capacity to innovate. Innovation, of course, requires many things, from the right culture at the top, to a healthy encouragement of employee engagement. However, it also requires two crucial building blocks: an ability to listen to and organise customer input, and a basic flexibility in the company's systems in order to exploit visionary bosses, insightful employees and great client feedback at a sensible time and cost.
So, I'm proposing the Supl definition of productivity in the digital age: sensitivity and flexibility.