Use of Productivity as the Quality Measure for any Job
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Discusses the reason why productivity is used as a quality measure as well as introduces some of the issues that contest the claim.
Using the productivity level of an employee to measure the quality of the job he or she is performing seems like the logical thing to do. After all, why should one need to look further than the Productivity level in order to see if an employee is doing fine, right? Well, not all the time.
The economic productivity level of an individual, a system, a company or even a government is the result if the comparison between the actual output for a certain amount of time and the potential output for the same period of time. A good example of this is a factory worker’s daily quota. Let us say that an average employee is able to dress 500 dolls for an eight hour shift. The productivity level of that is either reported as 500/8 hours or 62.5/1 hour of work, or roughly more than one doll a minute. If the mentioned principle of using an employee’s productivity level as a gauge of job quality is followed, then we can conclude that Employee A, who manages to dress over 500 dolls in 8 hours, has a high quality of work while Employee B who dresses below 500 hundred dolls has poor work quality. Therein lies the problem, how can a company tell that Employee A is not hurrying the process along and therefore resulting in poor quality dolls, while Employee B is ensuring quality that is why he is moving slowly?
The example above may also be translated into the company as a whole. Generally, people believe that businesses who produce the least amount of product are the ones who produce higher quality; while another that churns out products by bulk or mass production are of a lesser quality. Again, that is not always the case. Productivity level is a poor gauge of the quality level of any job. In depth studies must be performed before any conclusions can be made.
Another issue regarding this matter is an ethical one. Humanitarians in the workforce believe that it is unethical to reduce a person’s performance and abilities to a set of numbers, like the ones produced by productivity level reports. A human individual is far more than just the subjective data presented by these reports. It is therefore, not only inaccurate but also face an ethical dilemma.
The mentioned issues above may be contested for being so person centered and that companies do not care where and how data is gathered as long as there is data that presents how something is doing. No matter if it is subjective or not, it is still data that the company can use to find ways to improve profit.
If the productivity level is to be seen as a way of measuring an employee’s quality of work, then it should only be used temporarily. It should only be utilized when there are no other means available and is to be followed up by a more in depth study of an employee’s job quality and performance.
Tags: job, productivity, quality
