We recently asked over 1,000 executives about their approach to productivity as part of our 2017 Productivity Improvement Study.
Below you’ll find the results from our survey as well as my commentary and observations.
Is productivity an important KPI to companies?
I was delighted to see that 100% of respondents agreed that the productivity is an important indicator of the company.
Do the companies measure the productivity?
Also, I was happy to see that 92% of respondents declared that they measure the productivity.
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Peter F. Drucker
How often is analyzed the evolution of productivity
46% of responders analyze the productivity on a daily basis, and 35% make the analysis of the productivity once per month. Between these, 12% analyze of productivity weekly.
4% – analyze the productivity at 3 months, and 4% -analyze the productivity once per year.
A quick improvement of productivity is necessary?
Over 80% of respondents need a quick productivity improvement.
How fast is desired a quick productivity improvement
And more than 75% wants to have a substantial productivity improvement in less than 3 months.
Deeper Insights
The next thing I did was to look deeper into the data and cross-reference different categories. Here are some additional insights for you.
It is necessary to measure and improve the productivity, as well as innovation because the client needs new products at lower price. The productivity and innovation are the keys to the company development. Don’t forget that the productivity is the management’s responsibility.
So, my recommendation for that 8% who do not measure the productivity, is to create a system to measure the productivity. But you have to measure the company productivity based on output and not the individual’s productivity.
Analyzing the productivity on a daily basis or as often as possible without overcharging the people, gives the opportunity to see the deviations fast, and to apply countermeasures to fix the potential issues. Also, a weekly analysis could help to achieve the desired results at the end of the month. The difference between daily analysis and weekly analysis is reflecting in the number of opportunities for improvement:
– using a daily analysis, you will have 22 opportunities for improvement per month and,
– using a weekly analysis, you will have only 4 opportunities for improvement per month.
It is no reason to perform a productivity analyze (at any interval) if the root causes are not identified, and countermeasures are not applied.
What other questions would you like answers to? Let us know and we’ll share them in the comments below or include them in our next Productivity Improvement Study.
To all those that participated, a big thank you!