Evaluating Productivity on the Enterprise Level
The difficulty that many organizations face when it comes to productivity is that productivity can be a matter of personal preferences and abilities. Where one person prefers creating a list and checking off items when planning a project, another may need to talk through a project in a lot of depth to be able to plan it effectively. When you’re working in an enterprise-level organization, those differences can make it far more difficult to not only improve productivity, but also to evaluate it.
Taking the Time to Learn About Productivity
In the average organization, a lot of time is devoted to measuring output — how many widgets each worker built, how much their time cost the company and so on. But less time goes into thinking about how those numbers come about. There might be some time spent analyzing how the best worker performs and how he approaches his work, along with attempts to try to get other workers to adopt similar methods. But how often does an organization dive into why a particular worker has chosen a particular approach and if other workers have the ability to even learn that method.
The simple truth is that different strategies work for different people and, in most organizations, that means that different workers will need to learn how to evaluate their own productivity. That, in turn, requires a corporate culture that supports deep thinking about productivity and has looked at more than just the top performer’s way of getting things done. There may be a most efficient method on the books, but it’s worth building a team that will go out and learn about different types of productivity.
Building an Evaluation System that Goes Deeper
If you do a periodic evaluation of all the workers in a given organization, you’re almost always looking at numbers. That’s the only way to really draw comparisons across a company or an organization with hundreds, if not thousands of employees. But that approach doesn’t really get at the heart of the matter: you know what workers are producing, but not how they’re doing it.
Of course, there is a question of balance. At the enterprise level, going too deep can lead to a system of evaluations that never ends — when you finish evaluating the whole organization for one cycle, it’s already time to start again.
But there are ways to bring in qualitative information into the evaluation process. Even working with a relatively small sample of the organization can let you dive into the question of how people are getting their work done. Just among a group of ten people, you can easily find ten different approaches to the same task. Individual methods, such as setting a timer or batch processing tasks, can show up in surprisingly small sample groups, provided you’re willing to look for them.
Making Use of Your Data
There is no one true way to do any task. There is variability even in organizations where the corporate culture has set out very specific approaches to every task: think about McDonald’s, where you can get practically identical meals in any of their restaurants. But there are differences between individual McDonald’s locations. There are McDonald’s where a manager has taken it upon himself to think about the local traffic patterns and prep a few extra burgers before rush hour starts. There are McDonald’s where the person at the window is better about including barbecue sauce for your nuggets. There are a wealth of reasons that people return to the same McDonald’s over and over again, even when another location may be more convenient.
Taking variables like those above into account can make for a more productive organization. If you can analyze the different approaches that different successful workers use, rather than just your top widget-maker, you can increase the productivity of your whole team. Having multiple solutions for different problems means analyzing your workers to see what will best benefit them. That can sound like more work, but it can pay off with increased productivity across the board. It’s just a matter of really evaluating the productivity of individuals inside an enterprise-level organization, rather than just sticking to the numbers.
Image by Flickr user Natalie
