27th Nov 2007
Measuring Productivity
If you hang around here long enough, you’ll notice I get very bent out of shape when we talk about “productivity in the workplace,” particularly in terms of granting basic human rights to someone based on his or her productivity. And frequently spirituality in the workplace discussions are motivated by the desire to make workers more productive on an individual level. None of this makes me happy. Most of it disturbs me in the way that capitalism seems to take over the discussion of human rights in a way that turns humans into machines with input and output.
One of the reasons I find the notion of productivity problematic is that on an individual level it’s just about impossible to measure accurately. (It is much easier to measure productivity of the country in terms of money and overall units, but individual productivity is hard to measure unless we are making units of something.) For example, I washed dishes in college. Sometimes I worked for an hour and washed dishes for 200 people. Sometimes I worked for 2 hours and washed dishes for 50 people. Sometimes I had some pots to wash too. Sometimes the dish dryer was slow and I had to slow down the dish loads. Sometimes my dish gloves had holes and the hot water scalded my hands I had to go fast to prevent burns. Sometimes the food was impossible to remove from the dishes, so I had to rewash dishes. So how do you measure productivity for a dishwasher? The number of dishes washed/hour? The hardly reflects how hard I worked or how productive I was.
As a writer, I find it just about impossible to measure my own productivity. I could measure the number of words I write daily fairly easily. But what if the words are crap? And often I need long periods of silence and contemplate in order to come up with good words. Sometimes I need to take a walk in order to write. So how do you measure my productivity? Words? Documents produced over longer periods of time? Money earned? It’s not easy. Whatever system you use ends up neglecting some of what I do (and even most of what I do).
On that note, Work Styles, Attitudes, and Productivity of Scientists in the Netherlands and the U.K.: a comparison by gender is a study of male and female scientists in Europe that bases productivity on number of papers published. Now if you know scientists in universities you’ll note what a slim slice of their worklife that really is as a measure of productivity. Teaching doesn’t matter. Committee work doesn’t matter. Mentoring doesn’t matter. Publication does. This measure reflects values in Academia fairly well (publish or perish), but isn’t a particularly accurate measure of their overall productivity at work, just of their publications.
In any case, productivity is highly problematic both as a concept and to measure completely over the long-term. That be the point.
This is a really tough subject. Companies and employers (even small ones) desire results. As individuals, we want to get “what we pay for.” How do you measure that when the pay is hourly? Or salaried? Merit-based? Commission? Some combination of the above?
Should more jobs fall under the “creative professional” category?
I’m still trying to wrap my head around this one, but need a much stronger understanding of different economic models.
I wonder if you’re on to something with the “results” part of the equation. Because you can measure quality and quantity of results (providing it’s a report, presentation, item of some sort) far more easily than the “productivity” it took to get there.
Yes, I tend to be interested in jobs that pay based on outcome, e.g. you get paid for the quality of your work. I think we’ve all seen situations where two people get paid the same for (purportedly) the same work, and one person is busting their butt, and the other is working hard to stay under the radar and produce nothing. With lousy management and fear of lawsuits, the person who does nothing will go home every week with a paycheck. Is that just? Fair? Does it contribute to low morale on the part of the hardworker?
Then again, every example I’ve seen of corporations “switching” to “merit-based pay” - where now the employee is paid by “the room” (in the case of hotel housecleaning staff) or by “the sale” it basically means less income for the employee and more profit for the employer. So I’m generally suspicious when talking heads start complaining about worker productivity and suggest people should be paid based on what they produce. I’m not against it in theory - surely, that is how artists live, isn’t it? And many other people who work on contracts, be they programmers or plumbers.
But corporations have a weird way of twisting things.
If I recall correctly, there is a labor dispute at a fancy hotel in Pasadena precisely around the issue of paying the cleaning staff per room. Because, of course, some rooms are far dirtier than others.
And merit-based pay for teachers is equally tricky because of how students’ progress is measured (on standardized tests).
In any case, “productivity” is one of those words like “spirituality” that means a dozen different things. You always have to ask people what exactly they mean.