What is productivity? And, why does it matter?Learn Management Articles on management-info.biz. What is productivity? And, why does it matter? article will help answer your questions on Management Articles.We at management-info.biz specialize in Management Articles. Management Articles at management-info.biz provides the most up to date news and articles. If you have questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
By: Robert F. Abbott When Phil hires a new helper for one of his construction projects, he first watches to see whether or not the newcomer has the right attitudes and habits to keep him as an employee. And, if the newcomer meets expectations,' Phil introduces him to his philosophy about work by telling him the woodcutters story. Two woodcutters who are working together for the first time, set off in the morning to cut down trees. One woodcutter works very hard, and aside from a couple of breaks, works steadily all day. The other woodcutter, though, seems to take many more breaks, at least one every hour. So the first woodcutter expects he'll have cut down many more trees by the end of the day. But, when they quit for the day, the first woodcutter finds, to his surprise, that the second woodcutter has done more, despite taking all those breaks. And, in his frustration, the first woodcutter wonders out loud how the second woodcutter did it. The second woodcutter couldn't help but hear the first woodcutter's question, and replies, 'Yes, I take many more breaks, but every time I take one, I sharpen my axe.' Phil uses this story of the woodcutters to explain his ideas about productivity, and he doesn't relate it to the productivity which economists refer to in their statistics. Phil thinks of productivity in a very immediate way: how many nails you can drive in one hour, for example. The economists are talking about the same thing, only they're talking about it as the sum of many millions of businesses and organizations, so they're talking about productivity in an abstract way. Whatever the case, productivity simply refers to the amount of value you can get from labor, land, or capital (invested money). As we'll see in the next section, Phil's income goes up when he (and his helper’s) productivity goes up. Increasing productivity across a whole nation is also good news. It means everyone in society becomes more prosperous, that everyone (or almost everyone) will have more money to spend or save. Increased productivity can also mean lower prices. For example, if carpenters and home building companies increase their productivity, then house prices will go down. Generally speaking, though, consumers, owners of businesses, and workers in those businesses all share productivity gains. And what about people without job? Well they often gain, too, because when businesses owners and workers make more, they pay more in taxes. In turn, that makes more money available to governments for social programs. Having heard all that, you may be skeptical, thinking your prosperity hasn't gone up much, if at all. But you'd be wrong. Productivity has gone up, and gone up a lot over the past two hundred years, and especially over the past 50 years. It may be invisible to most of us, but productivity is one of the silver bullets that have given us our prosperity and so many of our choices.
|
More Articles:1. Two Critical Success Factors in an ITIL Implementation By Arno Esterhuizen Any IT manager who wants to pursue the IT Service Management journey by implementing the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) needs to understand two very important factors well in advance.• The first factor is to have dedicated, trained and committed process owners.If you want to have a successful Incident Management process which is under continuous improvement, you will need somebody who is ultimately responsible for it’s success and who can dedicate the time and focus to dr… 2. Employee (Dis) Satisfaction - Ten Ways to Really Upset Your People By Martin Haworth Want some guidelines for how you can definitely get under the skin of your workers? Here are some simple things known to irritate the heck out of them, time after time...If you want engaged, co-operative, motivated and productive staff on your team, this is a not-exhaustive list of things you can constructively do to mess it up.Here are just ten things you can do to really p**s off your people and almost guarantee failure in your workplace!Good luck (see the end for an alternative!)Fail to Com… 3. Balancing Power in Outsource Contract Agreements By Gavin Campbell The practice of outsourcing business processes has long been subject to the discussion how best to ensure optimal benefits for both parties involved in the outsource agreement.In conventional outsource agreements conflict often arises between the objective to minimize cost and the necessity to continually develop the service. This leads to unsatisfactory results for both parties. However, conflicts can be resolved by increasing the collaboration between both parties to a level where the servic… 4. Rescuing Projects in Crisis A project is in serious trouble having overrun its budget, and deliveries are far behind schedule. The previous project manager has been fired, team morale is low, sponsors are hopping mad, and senior management is fuming. You are brought in to take over the project and turn it around. What should you do? Well, before getting into the thick of action, consider the following reasons why projects generally run into trouble: 1: Insufficient commitment from project sponsors. 2: Unclear requirements… |
||||
