The Big Picture
Economists, business analysts and policymakers have all focused considerable attention on United States productivity growth in recent years. While calculating productivity seems to be a subjective science, there is simply no getting around it: productivity is critical -- to individuals, to businesses, to industry and to the nation.

A significant body of related statistics shows that productivity in the U.S. remains healthy.

Foremost, the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics last month reported that 2006’s first quarter productivity — as measured by output per hour of all persons — increased 3.9 percent in the business sector from the fourth quarter of 2005 to the first quarter of 2006, as output increased 6.4 percent and hours worked by all persons grew 2.4 percent (seasonally adjusted annual rates). Non-farm business productivity advanced at a 3.7 percent annual rate in the business quarter.

In manufacturing, the annual rate of productivity change (increase) was as follows:

• 3.8 percent in manufacturing;
• 3.5 percent in durable goods manufacturing; and
• 3.7 percent in nondurable goods manufacturing.

As the Dept. of Labor puts it, “advances in productivity, that is the ability to produce more with the same or less input, are a significant source of increased potential national income.”

Manufacturers were already outpacing their rivals in developed countries during 1995 to 2000, when their productivity was growing by 4.0 percent a year. After 2000, the country's metal-bashers somehow managed to raise their productivity growth by another notch, to 5.1 percent a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Economist just last week stated that, while no serious economist thinks that America can maintain “such a torrid rate of productivity growth over a longer period […] there are signs that America's productivity in manufacturing has been boosted by forces inherent in the structure of the economy, so that the sector should continue to thrive.”

Research by Dale Jorgenson of Harvard University and Kevin Stiroh of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, along with Mun Ho of think-tank Resources for the Future, has compared U.S. productivity in the late 1990s — during which the information-technology boom tailed off — with the productivity growth of the past five years. The economists looked not only at manufacturing but at the entire private sector, and suggested that there could be several explanations for the recent strong performance. The researchers’ paper says that not only has productivity growth accelerated further — by another 0.7 percent a year, to 3.2 percent — but the forces behind it also appear to have become more broadly based.

According to a Newsweek story last year, high productivity growth rates these past few years were driven by new technology, from speedier, more affordable computers to more efficient machine tools, which continued to boost productivity even after the bubble burst. In addition, businesses became better configured to make use of technology. According to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, the strong performance has been bolstered not only by greater use of computers and other technologies but also by the economy’s flexibility. Now, according to the aforementioned report, U.S. firms are finding numerous ways to raise productivity and are not merely “riding one wave of innovation from the IT boom.” As such, the economists think, productivity growth will settle at a rate above what the U.S. achieved in the two decades prior to 1995.

Bernanke says the strong national productivity advances look likely to continue. And Messrs Jorgenson and Stiroh, along with Mun Ho, expect private businesses as a whole to boost productivity by 2.6 percent over the next decade.

Indeed, that would be good news. Manufacturers, which are boosting productivity even more rapidly than the rest of the economy, should do even better, The Economist notes.

Always Connected, Always at Work
Perhaps the most significant catalyst for individual-worker productivity is technology. Between BlackBerrys and other PDAs, cell phones and, pretty much everywhere you go now, constant wireless Internet access (on increasingly less-expensive laptops), the modern worker has become “untethered,” notes a Kentucky Herald-Leader business article earlier this week.

A recent study conducted for a cable TV network concluded that such technological devices and constant Internet access have increased worker productivity by 50 percent, due in part to their enablement of multitasking.

Essentially, the study says, people now can do 12 hours of work during their eight-hour shifts.

Of course, multitasking is nothing new. Yet the last decade has seen technology help speed its spread to most frontline personnel. The average yearly increase in a business worker's productivity has routinely been above 2.5 percent since the late 1990s, according to U.S. Labor Department studies. That same percentage hovered at 2 percent or below for the majority of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

While workers are doing more in less time, however, multitasking and the bombardment of constant tech-enabled communication are increasing stress.

“The stress side of that can be that people truly are inundated with communication,” said Dr. Gary Patton, a psychiatrist with the Behavioral Medicine Network in Lexington.

Check your work e-mail from home before you go to bed, and there is still anywhere from 10 to 100 e-mail messages in your inbox by the time you arrive at work the next morning.

While technology has “radically changed the world” of workers, reducing the time it takes for correspondence, it has become “much more stressful.”

“I hate to be the old-fogey-sounding person ... but when I started practicing law, there was an expectation that if somebody asked you a question, you could take a little while and respond to them," Lexington attorney Lucinda Masterton said in the Kentucky business article. “Even if it was an emergency, people didn't expect to get an answer right away,” she said.

One current argument is that if somebody asks you a question now, you're expected to have an answer -- or at least a response -- to them immediately.

Construction executive Jim Gray summed it up with a laugh, saying, "There's no credible avoidance technique."

This feeling of immediate access can be stressful to people who "feel like they are always available and even maybe in trouble if they don't respond immediately." Thus, we often see people in the evenings or in social gatherings — outside of work hours — with BlackBerrys in hand, responding to a work-related inquiry despite the fact that the person may even be on vacation. (Dr. Patton said one of his friends uses a BlackBerry so often that the PDA has been dubbed the “CrackBerry, because we think he's addicted.”)

“The Extra Mile”: Individual Engagement, Individual Productivity
A December 2005 study by human-resources consultant Towers Perrin, which surveyed more than 85,000 workers at large and midsize companies in 16 countries, concluded that only 14 percent of workers are fully engaged on the job. Engagement here is defined as a measure of people’s willingness and ability to give discretionary effort at work.

This means workers fully engaged as expressed in a willingness to “go the extra mile for their employers, doing more than their job description requires,” tops out at only 14 percent, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article (via The Northwest Herald) noted.

An additional 62 percent are engaged only moderately, while the remaining 24 percent are disengaged.
In the U.S., 21 percent of workers are fully engaged on the job and willing to go the extra mile for their companies, down slightly from 22 percent in 2003. (The highest levels of employee engagement are in Brazil, 31 percent, and in Mexico, 40 percent.)

Engagement levels vary from industry to industry.

Engagement levels might be lacking in the U.S. because of “the way workers perceive that they are being treated.” Amanda Randall, leader of the organization research practice in Towers Perrin's Chicago office, said that motivated employees responded to recent cost cutting by working more hours and doing more with less help. When employee efforts are not rewarded, a resonant decrease in engagement is the result.

“They are feeling a little bit resentful that there has been this lip service to pay-for-performance,” Randall told the Pittsburgh paper. Pay-for-performance is used widely enough to result in less engaged workers generally being paid less than highly engaged ones.

Randall says the survey confirms other studies that proved helping employees become more committed boosts productivity and thus the bottom line. Increasing engagement levels 5 percent results in a 3 percent improvement in customer service scores and nearly a 1 percent improvement in operating margins, she says.

Conclusion
In the end, time is an unmanageable commodity, as it is a finite resource. Rather, how we manage ourselves impacts our productivity. We can manage what we do with the time we have, and thus improve individual productivity. “Disorganization, unclear goals, too many personal phone calls, disjointed processes, no routines, poor planning, procrastination, lack of focus, lack of training, junk e-mail, surfing, and it goes on,” said Peggy Duncan, a personal productivity expert, workshop leader and author of several books, in an About.com interview. “These are all time bandits that steal our time and people often don’t make the connection that it’s why they never have enough.

“Working in this state is an absolute breeding ground for stress,” she says.

Resources

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Productivity & Costs, People Are Asking

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Productivity and Costs, First quarter 2006, Revised, June 1, 2006

American manufacturing: Lean and unseen
The Economist, June 29, 2006

Out of Steam
by Karen Lowry Miller
Newsweek International, Feb. 21, 2005

Technology gives workers a new leash on life
by Scott Sloan
The Kentucky Herald-Leader, July 3, 2006

Study: Workers focused on other things
by Len Boselovic
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (via the Northwest Herald), Dec. 18, 2005

Increase Productivity and Decrease Work-Related Stress
by Elizabeth Scott
About.com Stress Management

Additional

8 Sure-Fire Strategies for Boosting Productivity
Gaebler Ventures

Engaged Employees Help Boost the Bottom Line
ISR (via PR Newswire), June 26, 2006