What is being said about two consecutive bank holidays and productivity or lack thereof can be misleading to those who are unaware of the factors that affect productivity.
Firstly, any manager/ supervisor worth his or her salt is aware of a subset of factors, namely work scheduling, staff allocation and re-allocation available to those who have the autonomy, the will and the requisite resources to implement.
Bank holidays do not suddenly appear, they are pre-designated allowing for adjustments, particularly in organisations where shift systems are in operation.
In a transcript giving a “definition of productivity and factors affecting it”, Professor Steven Tomlinson, teacher in economics and finance at the University of Texas, made the following points:
• An economist defines productivity as the amount of output that is produced by a given amount of labour input, i.e. if one takes an hour of labour input, productivity is the amount of output that that labour produces.
• The factors that affect productivity are (a) the availability of good tools, commonly called capital, i.e. the higher the capital to labour ratio the higher the productivity, (b) natural resources/raw materials with the higher the resources to labour ratio, the higher the productivity, (c) human capital, i.e. the higher the skills of the worker, the more output per hour of work, the higher productivity (d) technology, i.e. the better the overall level of “know-how”, the better the skill and accumulated knowledge about how to transform inputs into output, therefore the higher level of productivity.
The knowledgeable manager/supervisor is also aware that productivity measurements that focus solely on labour productivity as is typical in a factory setting and does not include the above-mentioned factors is only partial productivity as opposed to an organisation with several and varied production processes having to obtain total output by summing up the value added in each of the production processes.
Deeper analyses of production processes will show that other combined factors can have a greater impact on productivity than the single human-labour factor.
– Michael Ray
