Productivity – and everything that goes with it – is something we’ve become practically obsessed with. Ah, productivity itself is not a new idea. In fact, the concept of productivity has been around for as long as production has been around, so no doubt since humans figured out how to put a seed in the ground and produce a crop. In this article we will provide you the information about productivity in business.

Business productivity has become an important and ongoing discussion with industrialization. Making work – both human and machine driven – more efficient became an important objective, because more efficient labor meant more profits. (There are a whole host of side issues that have developed with this growing issue with labor productivity, but we’ll save them for another time.)

Business, or economic productivity, continued to be developed and improved during the Second Industrial Revolution, World War II , major technological advances , and economic globalization. But productivity has also become much more individual; it became a personal quest.

With the technology we use today, we have unlimited information and unlimited accessibility. This is great, on many levels, but it also leads to overload: the world is at our fingertips, literally, at all times. For people prone to distraction and procrastination (read: all people), the digital age quickly morphs into the unproductive age.

Hence the rise of our personal productivity activities, in the form of books, blogs, apps, and all the advice you could ever want. It’s an important quest. We’ve lost the boundaries that used to separate work from personal life, that used to limit our options and define our roles. These are big advances, but they bring the need to build our own filters and limits. If we want to create value in a world of limitless options, we need to learn to be productive.

But first, we have to figure out what we really mean by productive.

The business definition of productivity

Defining productivity for business really means talking about productivity in economic terms. And that’s the story of productivity. All of our personal, subjective ideas about what it means to be productive are derived from a very pragmatic, numbers-based definition of productivity.

Here ‘s how Asian Efficiency‘s Thanh Pham describes it :

“There is another definition used in economics that is important to know. In simple economic terms, productivity means the output you get per input. For example, if I give you 5 apples and you give me 1 liter of apple juice, your productivity will be 1 liter for 5 apples. However, if someone can get 1 liter of apple juice with 4 apples, that person will be more productive. It takes fewer apples to create the same amount of apple juice.”

“The metric used in this economics example (as you probably saw in your college economics class) is:

Productivity = Output / Input.”

This is the basic business or economic definition of productivity. Improving productivity in the business sense means either a) increasing output relative to input or b) decreasing input relative to output. You’ll hear this discussed in business terms with phrases like “reduce our overhead”, “increase our profit margin”, “reduce expenses”, “improve our revenue” and “be more efficient”.

Know some productivity indicators

Productivity indicators are related to the employees’ work diagnosis.

Data such as the time an employee spent to perform a service or the quality of the professional’s delivery are considered, as well as the goals and objectives set and achieved.

See the main types of indicators that allow you to have productivity control:

• Quality indicators: measure whether the outlined objective has been achieved. For example, if the goal was to sell 70% of the products in stock and it was met, the resources are being well spent and you can focus on strategies to sell the other 30%.
• Capacity indicators: How long did it take for your employees to meet the target? It is this data that the capacity indicator offers. You can identify if you can demand more from your team or if the goal has gone beyond capacity.
• Strategic indicators: it is the crossing of data between what was established in the strategy and the results obtained. So you assess whether the strategy is successful, needs to be changed, or what features should be added.

Some time ago this could be subjective, but today it is possible to count on tools that allow making this evaluation.

Leverage tools that help measure productivity

Did you know that with digital time control you are able to monitor indicators and control the productivity of your employees?

This is one of the technological tools that, in addition to facilitating the monitoring of the working day , generates data and indicators that allow this analysis to be carried out.  

Every day its employees digitally perform the clocking . At the same time, you know what he produced, what he did not produce, or what services were performed.

From this data on hours worked and production, managers are able to verify who produced more, in how much time, and to discover the reasons why production may be stagnant.