Marketing Scoops: Use The Five Whys To Be More Productive

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Planning your next moves is pretty crucial for being productive, but it’s only helpful if those plans are well informed. To succeed, you need to understand why previous attempts at similar tasks didn’t pan out how you wanted them to.

Conducting a personal after-action review is one way to assess your work, but to truly understand what went wrong and prepare for future tries, you need to dig deep. Try the “Five Whys” technique to get to the bottom of things. What is the “Five Whys” technique?…Story continues…

By: Lindsey Ellefson

Source: Lifehacker

Critics:

Productivity measures that use one class of inputs or factors, but not multiple factors, are called partial productivities. In practice, measurement in production means measures of partial productivity. Interpreted correctly, these components are indicative of productivity development, and approximate the efficiency with which inputs are used in an economy to produce goods and services.

However, productivity is only measured partially – or approximately. In a way, the measurements are defective because they do not measure everything, but it is possible to interpret correctly the results of partial productivity and to benefit from them in practical situations. At the company level, typical partial productivity measures are such things as worker hours, materials or energy used per unit of production.

Before the widespread use of computer networks, partial productivity was tracked in tabular form and with hand-drawn graphs. Tabulating machines for data processing began being widely used in the 1920s and 1930s and remained in use until mainframe computers became widespread in the late 1960s through the 1970s. By the late 1970s inexpensive computers allowed industrial operations to perform process control and track productivity.

Today data collection is largely computerized and almost any variable can be viewed graphically in real time or retrieved for selected time periods. When all outputs and inputs are included in the productivity measure it is called total productivity. A valid measurement of total productivity necessitates considering all production inputs.

If we omit an input in productivity (or income accounting) this means that the omitted input can be used unlimitedly in production without any impact on accounting results. Because total productivity includes all production inputs, it is used as an integrated variable when we want to explain income formation of the production process.

Davis has considered the phenomenon of productivity, measurement of productivity, distribution of productivity gains, and how to measure such gains. He refers to an article suggesting that the measurement of productivity shall be developed so that it ”will indicate increases or decreases in the productivity of the company and also the distribution of the ’fruits of production’ among all parties at interest”.

According to Davis, the price system is a mechanism through which productivity gains are distributed, and besides the business enterprise, receiving parties may consist of its customers, staff and the suppliers of production inputs. In the main article is presented the role of total productivity as a variable when explaining how income formation of production is always a balance between income generation and income distribution.

The income change created by production function is always distributed to the stakeholders as economic values within the review period. Productivity growth is a crucial source of growth in living standards. Productivity growth means more value is added in production and this means more income is available to be distributed. At a firm or industry level, the benefits of productivity growth can be distributed in a number of different ways:

To the workforce through better wages and conditions; to shareholders and superannuation funds through increased profits and dividend distributions;
to customers through lower prices; to the environment through more stringent environmental protection; and to governments through increases in tax payments (which can be used to fund social and environmental programs).

Productivity growth is important to the firm because it means that it can meet its (perhaps growing) obligations to workers, shareholders, and governments (taxes and regulation), and still remain competitive or even improve its competitiveness in the market place. Adding more inputs will not increase the income earned per unit of input (unless there are increasing returns to scale).

In fact, it is likely to mean lower average wages and lower rates of profit. But, when there is productivity growth, even the existing commitment of resources generates more output and income. Income generated per unit of input increases. Additional resources are also attracted into production and can be profitably employed.

Productivity is one of the main concerns of business management and engineering. Many companies have formal programs for continuously improving productivity, such as a production assurance program. Whether they have a formal program or not, companies are constantly looking for ways to improve quality, reduce downtime and inputs of labor, materials, energy and purchased services.

Often simple changes to operating methods or processes increase productivity, but the biggest gains are normally from adopting new technologies, which may require capital expenditures for new equipment, computers or software. Modern productivity science owes much to formal investigations that are associated with scientific management.

Although from an individual management perspective, employees may be doing their jobs well and with high levels of individual productivity, from an organizational perspective their productivity may in fact be zero or effectively negative if they are dedicated to redundant or value destroying activities. In office buildings and service-centred companies, productivity is largely influenced and affected by operational byproducts—meetings.

The past few years have seen a positive uptick in the number of software solutions focused on improving office productivity. In truth, proper planning and procedures are more likely to help than anything else. In order to measure the productivity of a nation or an industry, it is necessary to operationalize the same concept of productivity as in a production unit or a company, yet, the object of modelling is substantially wider and the information more aggregate.

The calculations of productivity of a nation or an industry are based on the time series of the SNA, System of National Accounts. National accounting is a system based on the recommendations of the UN (SNA 93) to measure the total production and total income of a nation and how they are used. International or national productivity growth stems from a complex interaction of factors.

Some of the most important immediate factors include technological change, organizational change, industry restructuring and resource reallocation, as well as economies of scale and scope. A nation’s average productivity level can also be affected by the movement of resources from low-productivity to high-productivity industries and activities.

Over time, other factors such as research and development and innovative effort, the development of human capital through education, and incentives from stronger competition promote the search for productivity improvements and the ability to achieve them. Ultimately, many policy, institutional and cultural factors determine a nation’s success in improving productivity.