Skip to main content

Has Productivity Increased During The Pandemic?

Image
By

 For the last 45 years, I have worked in the consulting business helping businesses and organizations improve their productivity and profitability through effective implementation of recommendations.  I am a Certified Productivity Specialist and a Master Productivity Specialist as well, through the Association of Productivity Specialists (a-p-s.org),  As a result of this experience, I believe I have a very good knowledge on productivity issues across a broad range of industries .

I was recently reading an article from Bloomberg.com (formerly Business Week Magazine) that suggested that Covid has boosted productivity.  I have also seen articles saying the exact opposite.  So what is it?

I have no doubt that productivity has increased over the pandemic.  Productivity is defined as output per hour of work.  Another way to define it is "what the worker gave you (output) over what you gave the worker (pay). The basis for this is people are:

        1) more relaxed and perhaps creative working from home

                   Would this increase productivity?  Typically yes  

                   2) there are less interruptions, less wandering around and less water-cooler type conversations, 

                    Would this increase productivity?  Unequivocally yes

                   3)  companies laid off their most junior and in experienced workers,

                    Would this increase productivity?  Typically yes

                    4)  they have less traffic problems and transportation issues etc. 

                     Would this increase productivity?  Yes

                     5) for those essential workers who were also still working at their normal place of business     where the sickness of others caused them to work additional hours and do more with less,                    

                       Would this increase productivity?  Probably yes

So all and all, productivity did go up for these and other reasons. But our economy nevertheless stagnated. There are over 10 million fewer jobs in the USA.  So while individual productivity probably did increase, the overall economy's productivity went down because there was less produced and less spent,  As people slowly return to the office, the reasons listed above in 1-5 will disappear, and unfortunately productivity will go down before going up.   

Best,

Bob  5/25/2021 


 

  

  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Do You?

By
 Do you procrastinate?  I know I do it more often than I would like to admit.  We all have a tendency to procrastinate.  Very recently, I saw this photo in a LinkedIn post.   To be legally clear, this is a billboard type advertisement by Nike. They are very famous for their "Just Do It" slogan.   Now they have two and they have combined both into an even more powerful expression. The definition of "procrastinate" from the Oxford dictionary is: "to delay or postpone action; put off doing something."  It is like the old colloquialism "Manana."  Mañana is tomorrow in Spanish.  We all do it to one degree or another.   From a business perspective, to procrastinate is a terrible situation if you or a great many people in a company or organization do it.  If it occurs too often or too much, then what does it do:  it has the probability to DELAY MOST EVERYTHING.  Is that what you really want?  No, I doubt it.  It very we...
Post a Comment
Read more

ARE WE TEACHING THE RIGHT THINGS IN GRAMMAR SCHOOL?

By
It was decades ago that I was in grammar school.  Things were significantly different then than they are now.  Of course computers and smart phones were not even in our line of sight as they are today.  I am not questioning the digital revolution one whit, as I believe it is integral to our growth as people, our growth as an economy as well as our growth globally. But I am dismayed by our departure from grammar school years of some of the basics that we used to go through.  I remember one class in particular in 7th grade (about age 12) called Home Economics, in which both the boys and girls had to take.  It was a school year long class and included cooking, sewing, electricity and plumbing.  We all had to learn how to cook some basic foods and as part of the class had to cook a hot lunch for ourselves.  And I am not talking about just opening a can or defrosting someth...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Flaw Of Averages

By
Yes, this post will be primarily a copy of a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article.  The article is the point of this blog. Over my decades in consulting, one of the major requirements in our niche was to insure that our clients received the savings we had forecast that they would achieve in a mutually agreeable manner.  In the very beginning, when I started back in 1974, computers were not easily available or accessible as they had to be huge room-size machines and many clients did not even have them.  So we used adding machines with paper tape to the shortly thereafter personal hand held-calculators.  Personal computers starting with the very first Apple or Radio Shack model proved far superior but had minimal calculating capacity.  None were perfect and because of this limitation, a straight line average over a years period was typically used to compare history to current and prove savings had been achieved. ...
Post a Comment
Read more