At my corporation, Motorola, where we invest about seven percent of our payroll in the training and development of our employees we get an average of 20 percent per year productivity improvement as measured over the last five years. Certainly statistics abound to support the thesis that intellectual capabilities are what provide the major impetus for North American business success. The World Economic Forum believes that future prosperity for industrialized nations depends on innovation.
Productivity is a word much bandied about today.
Interestingly, though, few people have a real understanding of what it means, and significantly, most would be hard pressed to measure productivity in their own workplace. So, if we're going to talk about improving productivity, it seems advisable to first explore what productivity is and to suggest ways of measuring it. Productivity here refers to labor productivity, the amount of output per hour worked. Productivity is used to measure the relative efficiency of an organization in terms of labor costs versus realized revenues. Clearly, all things being equal, Company A could be said to enjoy higher better productivity per employee.