Re:At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at ...
by imtringued on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @05:47AM
(#24479471)
The real problem isn't measuring the productivity of doing work in its entirety. Installing plumbing is a job. Since only one person is doing the plumbing and that person only does plumbing you can measure the productivity of that job and attribute it directly to a single person.
Once you have a group of people all working together on the same job or the inverse where you have a single person do a variety of jobs everything is different.
You split the big job into smaller jobs and distribute them to people. Some jobs are easier and bring in more money and therefore are more "productive" than others. But all jobs have to be done, no matter how productive they are. So you end up handing easy and difficult work to people. When you start to measure individual productivity of each team member you start noticing that there is a huge variance in productivity. Some people are "useless" while others are highly productive. When you remove the "least productive" people from the job then you notice something odd. Suddenly the productivity of everyone else goes down as well. Your productivity measurements were actually just measuring the way you distributed the jobs.
I remember a machinist talking about how he spends all his day fixing his coworkers mistakes. They kept breaking $100 tools (tool as in endmills) which jammed the machines and he's the only one who did the thankless job of making the machines usable again. He made fixtures that his coworkers broke and then he made them again.... Oh and he had a quota of how many parts he has to make per day. After all, measuring the productivity of a machinist should be pretty easy. Just count how many parts he makes per day. Of course the coworkers always exceeded the quota while he was always well below the quota.
Once you have a group of people all working together on the same job or the inverse where you have a single person do a variety of jobs everything is different.
You split the big job into smaller jobs and distribute them to people. Some jobs are easier and bring in more money and therefore are more "productive" than others. But all jobs have to be done, no matter how productive they are. So you end up handing easy and difficult work to people. When you start to measure individual productivity of each team member you start noticing that there is a huge variance in productivity. Some people are "useless" while others are highly productive. When you remove the "least productive" people from the job then you notice something odd. Suddenly the productivity of everyone else goes down as well. Your productivity measurements were actually just measuring the way you distributed the jobs.
I remember a machinist talking about how he spends all his day fixing his coworkers mistakes. They kept breaking $100 tools (tool as in endmills) which jammed the machines and he's the only one who did the thankless job of making the machines usable again. He made fixtures that his coworkers broke and then he made them again.... Oh and he had a quota of how many parts he has to make per day. After all, measuring the productivity of a machinist should be pretty easy. Just count how many parts he makes per day. Of course the coworkers always exceeded the quota while he was always well below the quota.