The ability to drive increased value from a fixed level of inputs is one of the key features of effective management and it has underpinned economic growth since the industrial revolution. But as knowledge workers play an ever bigger role in the economy, how can we go about measuring, and then improving, their productivity?
In some industries, such as manufacturing, the task of measuring the productivity of individual workers is reasonably straightforward because managers can simply divide the number of hours a person works by the number of widgets they produce. In others, however, particularly the so-called "knowledge industries", the challenge is much more difficult because it's a lot tougher to isolate the value of an individual's contribution. After a computer game has been created, for example, how are managers supposed to disentangle the value added by the various participants in that process? How much value has been added by the person who came up with the initial idea? How much by each of the people who designed it? How much by the marketers? In a heavily cited paper published in 1999, Peter Drucker argued that improving knowledge worker productivity should be regarded as the "the biggest of the 21st century management challenges" and the "first survival requirement" of developed economies.
Since then, however, progress on understanding how we can even measure knowledge worker productivity has been disappointingly slow. A brief trawl through the academic work produced on the subject since 2000 doesn't throw up much in the way of ground breaking research. More importantly, I think many would agree that companies themselves are still a long way from getting to grips with the problem. The knowledge worker is still basically treated as a black box by most firms. Dishearteningly, it seems that many academics don't believe there's a solution to the problem. Perhaps they're right. Maybe this is just one of those issues that's simply too complex for us to get to grips with. Maybe the productivity of knowledge workers is destined to remain an eternal mystery. Then again, that's probably what everyone says about a difficult problem until some bright spark comes along, opens up the box and shows us all the answer.
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