Interruptions, Distractions, and, Amazingly, Productivity are on the Rise
Today’s career professional, even with massive online surfing, beats the pants off of yesteryear’s career professional in terms of getting things done. Today, workers in all types of organizations, including government, non-profit sector groups, health care, and education, as well as private industry devote a slightly higher percentage of their time to the tasks and responsibilities for which they actually were hired, and they have advanced tools that aid them in ways that the workforce ancestry could hardly imagine .
The computer has actually increased U.S. labor productivity measured in output per hour, no matter how you cut it. Robert Gordon, author of Macroeconomics (9th edition), reports that labor productivity is now on the order of more than 10 times what it was when the first electricity plant began operation in 1882.
To be sure, intermittently many people goof off at the click of a mouse. Surveys show that non-job related web-surfing, social networking, and online correspondence is rampant. Also, who doesn’t make personal phone calls or attend to personal business during the workday?
Even with the latest diversions, most workers are making diligent efforts a decent percentage of the time. The higher-level of industriousness among today’s workforce may be a sensible reaction to the competitiveness in the workplace, a scarcity of higher paying jobs, or the fear being axed. It could be because they’re dedicated, goal-oriented, highly ethical, fearful of losing their jobs, or a combination of all the above. Or, it may be a result of improved workplace monitoring techniques. An employer’s ability to gage actual performance levels of employees has never been greater than it is today. Local area networks rule. So do surveillance cameras. Surveys show that more than 60% of employers monitor employees’ activities and at least 15% of employers observe employees via hidden camera. No fun.
In the typical office, before electric typewriters, and certainly before PCs, getting 25 or 30 original business letters out the door in a day once represented an impressive achievement, all that an employer could expect from a worker in one day. Now, anyone, and I mean anyone including some ten year-olds, can generate 500 to 1,000 letters in a day if one chooses, and that wouldn’t even be news. On any given day the aggregate of emails sent by individuals, and we’re not talking about spam here, is more than 500 to 600 times greater than the entire aggregation of web pages accessible on the Internet. No matter how productive the worker, with this overabundance of information, distraction is inevitable.
Perhaps an underlying element for the increase in productivity across the board is the increase in expectations. As soon as greater technological capabilities come along, BAM! So do expectations. In 1827, the Erie Canal became functional for the passage of horse drawn canal ships — at the blazing speed of four miles per hour. So many vendors wanted to transport their goods from the west through the Canal, and to the Hudson River down to New York City, that the Canal immediately became clogged. And so, it was enlarged, then again dramatically enlarged, and then yet again.
At every junction expectations about the traffic volume that the Canal could handle rose and then, almost instantly, existing Canal capacity was never enough. Soon the railroads became popular and for many the Canal fell into disuse until it became a recreational and tourist attraction in the 20th century. It went from expectation to over expectation to abandonment within a generation. How cold!
The computer has actually increased U.S. labor productivity measured in output per hour, no matter how you cut it. Robert Gordon, author of Macroeconomics (9th edition), reports that labor productivity is now on the order of more than 10 times what it was when the first electricity plant began operation in 1882.
To be sure, intermittently many people goof off at the click of a mouse. Surveys show that non-job related web-surfing, social networking, and online correspondence is rampant. Also, who doesn’t make personal phone calls or attend to personal business during the workday?
Even with the latest diversions, most workers are making diligent efforts a decent percentage of the time. The higher-level of industriousness among today’s workforce may be a sensible reaction to the competitiveness in the workplace, a scarcity of higher paying jobs, or the fear being axed. It could be because they’re dedicated, goal-oriented, highly ethical, fearful of losing their jobs, or a combination of all the above. Or, it may be a result of improved workplace monitoring techniques. An employer’s ability to gage actual performance levels of employees has never been greater than it is today. Local area networks rule. So do surveillance cameras. Surveys show that more than 60% of employers monitor employees’ activities and at least 15% of employers observe employees via hidden camera. No fun.
In the typical office, before electric typewriters, and certainly before PCs, getting 25 or 30 original business letters out the door in a day once represented an impressive achievement, all that an employer could expect from a worker in one day. Now, anyone, and I mean anyone including some ten year-olds, can generate 500 to 1,000 letters in a day if one chooses, and that wouldn’t even be news. On any given day the aggregate of emails sent by individuals, and we’re not talking about spam here, is more than 500 to 600 times greater than the entire aggregation of web pages accessible on the Internet. No matter how productive the worker, with this overabundance of information, distraction is inevitable.
Perhaps an underlying element for the increase in productivity across the board is the increase in expectations. As soon as greater technological capabilities come along, BAM! So do expectations. In 1827, the Erie Canal became functional for the passage of horse drawn canal ships — at the blazing speed of four miles per hour. So many vendors wanted to transport their goods from the west through the Canal, and to the Hudson River down to New York City, that the Canal immediately became clogged. And so, it was enlarged, then again dramatically enlarged, and then yet again.
At every junction expectations about the traffic volume that the Canal could handle rose and then, almost instantly, existing Canal capacity was never enough. Soon the railroads became popular and for many the Canal fell into disuse until it became a recreational and tourist attraction in the 20th century. It went from expectation to over expectation to abandonment within a generation. How cold!
