Category: 10. Productivity

Counting hours worked isn’t cutting it anymore

A bang-on article in Fortune magazine by Robert Pozen, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management  If you are reading this, do you really care how many hours I took to write it? Or do you just care about the freshness of my ideas and the clarity of my writing? As this example illustrates, counting …

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Knowledge workers are more productive from home

An interesting study has come up with the above headline finding – it was published in the Harvard Business Review and conducted by Professor Julian Birkinshaw  and Pawel Stach of London Business School, and Jordan Cohen of Lifelabs Learning – extracts follow For many years, we have sought to understand and measure the productivity of …

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Potential £145bn productivity boost for UK economy

An LLB – LondonLovesBusiness.com – finance reporter has just announced some good news – the potential for some very big and positive numbers concerning UK SME sectors which would do much to dispel the gloom currently darkening the lives of so many in the UK – if the report is anywhere near being right, one …

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The ‘Circular Economy’ to boost national productivity

When talking about productivity, most focus on labour productivity and seemingly ignore how well other costly input resources are used – hence the following article by Rémy Le Moigne, MD of Gate C, and published by Greenbiz, is most welcome During the COVID-19 pandemic, many hospitals faced a major shortage of personal protective equipment, ventilators and …

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It’s output results, not input hours, that matter

A piece by Jared Lindzon of Fast Company follows – at long last, some in the outside world are now saying what this website has been banging on about for years – the pandemic has reinforced how foolish it is to compare input times with output volumes, especially when it comes to knowledge-based work. In …

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Organisation productivity measurement

Professor Jillian MacBryde from the University of Strathclyde says: “When manufacturers talk about productivity, they’re not talking about the same thing as the economists and politicians – they’re not even talking about the same thing when you go from company to company” Such is the current fog enshrouding the productivity of UK businesses The set …

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Current NHS productivity measurement

The University of York’s Centre for Health Economics confidently announced that, despite the government making drastic cuts: “Hard working NHS staff are providing 16.5% more care per £ than they did 10 years before whilst national productivity has only grown by 6.7% over the same period In particular, they claim that: NHS outputs have continuously …

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Waste murders productivity

Whilst few managers measure productivity well, even fewer measure their waste of outputs and costly inputs Waste arises both internally and externally: Internal waste = When things are not done RFT (Right First Time) and work is rejected or has to be reworked External waste = When things are delivered to customers either not as …

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Current productivity fog

All managers need to get the most out of all costly input resources they employ: In the private sector, to beat their competition in meeting customers’ needs whilst minimising unit costs and maximising sales and profit margins In the public sector, to optimise the number and quality of services on offer However, most managers do …

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Aggregation hides info needed

Current measures of productivity become less and less useful the higher the level they go: Aggregation increasingly blurs the performance picture Apples get mixed with pears Specific inputs used for specific outputs and outcomes get lost in the mix At national level, this aggregation problem is at its worst, compounded by much output and most …

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Work hard or work well?

Many say the secret for a good life is ‘work hard and play hard’ Leila Hock, in an article for Career Contessa, disagrees – ‘work hard’ apparently “makes my eyes roll a little” She believes we’ve become too preoccupied with “the grind” and it’s actually bringing us down – “It has a negative effect on …

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Waste leaves productivity dead in the water

 A post by author Charles Hugh Smith hits the nail on the head about the ‘productivity puzzle’ – rising waste in all sectors, hardly mentioned by the experts, is mostly to blame Productivity in the U.S. has been declining since the early 2000s. This trend mystifies economists, as the tremendous investments in software, robotics, networks and mobile …

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Misleading research metrics

In an article entitled ‘Capitalism is ruining science’, Meagan Day (for www.jacobinmag.com) points out that universities existed before capitalism and pursued not profit but truth and knowledge But no longer The modern university has become increasingly subservient to the imperatives of capitalism i.e. competition, profit maximisation and increasing labour productivity In academia, this manifests itself as …

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More demand, more productivity

According to Marshall Auerback, a market analyst and commentator, after a year-long analysis of seven developed countries and six sectors, global management consultancy company McKinsey reported that: “Demand matters for productivity growth and increasing demand is key to restarting growth across advanced economies.”  The report by James Manyika, Jaana Remes and Jan Mischke was published in the Harvard Business …

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Steel industry productivity

Professor Mark Perry, University of Michigan, wrote about productivity in the US steel industry – this is especially relevant given President Trump is threatening to protect the industry by introducing tariffs of 25% on imported steel and 10% on imported aluminium The main reason for the loss of US steel jobs is a huge increase …

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Micro and Macro productivity

Productivity is a measure of how efficiently outputs are produced from costly inputs Sounds simple – but, if it means anything to anyone, it can also mean different things to different people, especially when used at micro or macro levels At the MICRO/ ORGANISATION LEVEL productivity measurement is used to: Check that most output is being …

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SoL and QoL outcomes sought from productivity

Productivity is always in the news, not least because Nobel economist Paul Krugman says: “A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise output per worker” Productivity not only determines the SoL (Standard of Living) of everyone in the land but it also has a significant …

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Scanning the productivity horizon

First, productivity improvement transformed the agriculture sector providing millions more people with more and better quality of food and drink at more affordable prices Then it was manufacturing’s turn, providing more and better clothes and shoes, white goods and cookers, bikes, cars or planes – all making lives easier and getting from A to B …

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Why only labour productivity?

Why do we measure just labour productivity when it’s the productivity of all costly input resources used together that matters most: Because we always have done – it was relatively easy to count in the old manufacturing days? Because if you produce more per worker, there’s more to share out to each worker – which …

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If productivity so vital, why not measured?

Capita surveyed 250 managers and 250 workers across a range of UK industries including retail, logistics and construction They found a ‘huge disconnect’ between the number of managers who feel productivity is important and those who actually measure it Key findings were: Only 32% of bosses feel their business is very productive yet 71% do not …

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Myths about productivity?

An interesting set of views and counter claims about productivity were found on Google: It leads to higher wages: It doesn’t It needs collective bargaining, but unions have mostly lost their influence It doesn’t result in fewer jobs: In an ideal world, it would lead to increased output, increased market share and even increased number of …

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