💡 Here's a question for you: will there ever be a perfect way to measure productivity? 📧 Is it the number of emails sent? Nah. 🪑 The amount of time spent at the desk? Nope. 🕒 Hours logged in meetings? *facepalm* Judging productivity has never been an exact science. How often have you seen someone get an undeserved promotion just because they work long hours? In a perfect world, everyone would get measured on the quality of their individual output. The problem is... that's neither universal nor scaleable. So bosses count the stuff that *is* universal and easy to measure: emails, meetings, mouse clicks. Why? Not because they actually think those data points are perfect. These methods are used because they're simple and provide a small piece of insight, even though they don't tell the whole story. But you know what's cool? Perhaps GenAI will be able to crack this. ❗Do you think it's possible that a universally useful way of measuring productivity could exist someday? - Something both scaleable and nuanced? - Something more universal than individual KPIs. - Something more useful than counting meetings or mouse clicks. - Something that considers context, recognizes quality work, and benefits both employers and employees? Every current measure fails in one way or another. But will there ever be a perfect way to measure productivity? What do you think? 👇
Measuring productivity has never been easier. With all the IT at HR and management's disposal, there are no excuses for the lack of standardized metrics. Let's take phone usage during working hours, I have seen colleagues spending half of their working days playing games and chatting. I use my phone for approximately 2.15 hours daily, regardless of whether I'm working or off. Managers should randomly check cell phone battery usage and deduct it from working hours. On desktop workstations, IT Admins have tools to measure user sessions, application usage, and more. Reports can be obtained for any applications used by the users. Additionally, you can set up a plan to measure time consumption for specific tasks within departments. Assign the same task to all employees within the department, measure the most and least productive employees, and calculate the average to understand the time required for specific tasks to be completed.
Crossover the implication is that you’re referring to individual productivity in a system. You can create some useful metrics in some specific circumstances, but these seldom address the only measure of importance, which would be system productivity. In fact, many, if not most measures of individual productivity lead to a loss of system productivity. Examples abound.
Terry Rosen
1w
There cannot be such a measure, as described above. It's not because counting isn't accurate enough. It's because counting (enumerative study) cannot attribute causality (analytic study). I'm not sure this is the fault of AI. I think it's the fault of AI scientists. Dr. Deming revealed this in his article On Probability as a Basis for Action. He shows why enumeration CANNOT reveal cause. Can we count how much was produced? Absolutely. Can we use that count to describe why that's how got produced? No way. It's impossible. In my universe, this example serves: A student in my class has scored badly on 7 straight math quizzes. Why has he scored consistently badly? Some causes are invisible. But let us imagine we pose the question to a room full of teachers, professionals in their field. A short list of possible ideas that might be brought up Lack of sleep Lack of food Lack of effort Lack of parent engagement Lack of behavior reinforcement Lack of sufficient language skills (non-English speaker) The list could go on. I've never heard a teacher mention their own skills as a variable. If you don't know what an analytic study is, it cannot be used to assess cause.
There cant be a universal solution as it would depend on type business/production we are dealing with. However, synchronization of all stake holders i.e. sales, procurement, finance, marketing & production work force is mandatory in every business. I am personally against long meetings where we record minutes & waste hours. Agenda may be circulated well before & taken as homework, comments & suggestions be invited before the meetings, short presentations or input on selected comments/suggestions & there we go with a decision.
I'm not sure we'll be able to do that. Every task that requires intellect has a large component of background thinking and planning. So, quantifying input/effort will not be possible. An effective but heuristic way would be to look at the deliverables angle.
As some have indicated here, we must first define individual productivity, group productivity along with institutional or organizational productivity before there can be any meaningful discussion and quantification of (measurement of) productivity. Even before that we must define what constitutes productivity as that applies to the above classifications. Some things and areas of concerns may not be quantifiable even with a multitude of definitions as they will rely on defining values which may have uncountable options and variations and qualities to consider. In any case, there must be at least one common denominator of and for productivity.
The best way to measure productivity in Scrum is by using Velocity. Velocity tracks the amount of work (in story points) completed during a sprint, providing insight into the team's capacity and efficiency over time. Its accuracy depends on consistent story point estimation and stable team dynamics.
Sara Cunha
1w
There is no perfection in anything we do...so the answer is no...to start with...nobody is perfect
Terry Rosen
1w
Upon reflection: of what use is a perfect measure of productivity? Deming said management's job is prediction. How will perfect measures be used? To predict what? I think many of us made assumptions, but your post does not mention this explicitly.
Measure business outcomes, drive incentives off of those business outcomes. People are humans, not finely tuned Ferraris, we are organic and part of a business ecosystem - its not a machine its a living breathing entity. As such it needs to be fed, some in this ecosystem will outperform others on an individual basis but the chemistry of the whole is the critical part to watch. Some individuals will appear to not be as productive but may in fact fill the gaps between the higher performers that allow those high performers to perform at their level. This is the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.