Hi Everyone
I'm wondering which units organisations use to measure productivity and therefore engagement.
At the moment, we're using absenteeism but I was keen to find something more effective to measure and therefore address changes in engagement.
Thanks
As others have intimated, you really need to define what "productivity" means in your business in order to be able to select units of measurement that are relevant. David rightly identifies the number of people (and implicitly, the amount of time) needed to produce x units of goods in a production environment; in consultancy or engineering design services it is more likely to involve the proportion of worked time that is billed to customers.
As regards engagement, the only measures that seem to provide some degree of tested correlation involve surveying staff on this subject. To date I haven't seen an "engagement meter" that has been proven to work.
I agree with what others have said which I would paraphrase as "correlation is not causality". i.e. more whip strokes will produce more effort on pulling the oars, but that us by no means an indicator of engagement.
To pick up on Ray's point about an engagometer that works, my favourite instrument is the Gallop 12. There are so many on the market that claim to measure engagement but many are not rooted in solid research. Natasha, I agree with the previous comments that you if you measure productivity you aren't necessarily also measuring engagement. Using the Gallop 12 would give you reliable data you can use to focus on activity which will build engagement. Marcus Buckingham's book, First Break All The Rules is, IMO, essential reading for HR professionals.
Back on galley slaves, if you are ever in Barcelona, visit the Maritime Museum. They have a life-size galley and information on the economics of operating a galley. The slaves are your engine and you need them to be working at peak efficiency, which means e.g. carrying enough water to keep them all hydrated. Also, the museum building itself is interesting. It is the medieval building where they built galleys. If you're interested in history or architecture there are plenty of medieval churches surviving and some medieval houses, but not so many examples of medieval industrial buildings.
About measuring productivity, just might be worth adding tthe point that in engineering design, yes as was mentioned that design hours booked to paying client jobs is a common measure of commercial productivity but design hours booked to bids and proposals etc is ‘productivity’ just the same too. Some non productive hours such as staff absences are clear enough, but the trouble is of course that a lot of other non productive time gets booked out to current jobs by default. For example, a designer will invariably book a full day of their time to their current job whereas in reality they may only have spent a fraction of the time booked actually designing and the rest chatting to their colleagues or on Facebook or whatever.
So time booked out to clients is often a most unreliable measure albeit that it can be the best one you’ve got.
This becomes very apparent when there’s a shortage of work - there may well be an ‘idle time’ category to book against but if they get the chance most people won’t want to admit that they’re sitting around with nothing to do so will book this idle time to any other job they can mange to do so. Therefore design hours on jobs during slack periods can become hugely inflated and works of fiction essentially.
An experienced person wandering quietly through a design office ideally frequently can usually readily gauge how hard or otherwise the designers are working, but not of course empirically.
