日本財団 図書館


Sheet 26

 

PRODUCTIVITY IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

 

In recent years, private companies have been eager to improve the productivity levels of white collars workers. Public sector, on the other hand, where most employees are engaged in office work, has never even attempted to address this issue. Perhaps we should take a closer look at the productivity levels of public administration.

 

1 How to Measure Productivity

 

Productivity may be measured by levels of input & output. On a production line, it is fairly straightforward to estimate the volumes of input & output. It is more difficult, however, to gauge such a measurement for white collar workers who themselves pay little heed to the issue of productivity.

Productivity is certainly very difficult to measure. Accurate measurements may be impossible to obtain, but it is nevertheless important that attempts be made to measure every factor possible. This will provide a basic guide as to how productivity might be improved.

One measurement of productivity, for example, is that of labor, which may be expressed as follows;

 

Labor productivity = Output ÷ Total labor hours = {Labor hours directly responsible for output which might be expressed as (total labor hours - indirect labor hours) ÷ total labor hours} × {output ÷ direct labor hours}

 

This formula should encourage employees to increase direct labor and decrease indirect labor. They must be made aware, for example, that hours spent on internal procedures such as accounting which do not constitute as a direct contribution to public interests should be minimized as far as is reasonable while keeping the quality of these operations intact.

An example measurement of productivity in the office is response time to telephone inquiries. One organization has already actually measured how long it took various employees to respond to telephone inquiries and as a result, tried to cut this response time.

There are numerous ways to calculate such measurements. One is to make a standard form of memo which takes note of when and from whom the inquiry was made, who received it, who replied to it and how long it took for this reply. Keeping note of this response time to the minute is a cumbersome and unnecessary exercise. Several check boxes depicting information such as "answered on the spot", "within 30 minutes", "within 1 hour" and "over 1 hour" is enough. These memos should be collected intermittently and reviewed to find out in which areas productivity needs to be increased.

Research has shown that these measurements towards response time increased employees awareness of the importance of productivity improvement.

・They were more conscious about the quality of their communication with colleagues and incidents of messages being forgotten to be conveyed or misunderstandings arising from poor quality communication lessened.

・Quite often in the past, when an employee received a phone call in the absence of the officer in charge, they promised that the officer would return their call without actually inquiring what the call was in reference to. The officer would later have to telephone to inquire what the call was about before they could even start to respond to the caller's request. The process outlined above was found to be inefficient and in the absence of the staff concerned the employee receiving the call came to write a memo of what the caller wished to talk about.

・In order to respond in a quick and accurate manner to each inquiry, action to enhance productivity was taken in areas such as providing standard answers to regular inquiries.

 

 

 

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