Productivity Is King – Friday Distraction
The term productivity gets tossed around a lot. But do we really know what it means? Productivity is a state of producing something. It also refers to the effectiveness of an effort, as in the output versus input. Productivity is about outcomes. It’s about using minimum input to achieve maximum output.
So productivity is important. I once worked for a company that tracked the productivity of each of their locations. They decided that the productivity metric needed to be XX. Each month, they produced a report that listed every location and its productivity measurement. Also on the report was a line – named after the person who determined the productivity measurement. For the story, we’ll call it the Smith line.
Every month, we got our reports from corporate HQ and every month we anxiously awaited finding out if we were above or below the Smith line. Below the line meant creating a SMART plan that would show how we planned to get ourselves above the Smith line. (Side note: We did a lot of SMART plans. That’s how I learned about the importance of productivity.)
That’s why this Time Well Spent from our friends at Kronos caught my eye. Knowing your productivity is important.
I don’t want to say that we should always be productive because that’s not true. When I’m working on a hobby, I don’t want to be productive. I also don’t focus on productivity during vacation, unless it’s to figure out how many fun things I can do in the short amount of time I have. But from a business perspective, we should know productivity. I’d wager to say employees don’t want to work for companies that aren’t productive. It’s a waste of their time.
For organizations to be successful, they need to know how they are producing products and services. That ties into profits. And profits determine if your successful – and above the Smith line!
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