Workstation design for organizational productivity - National ...

Organizational Productivityand Office Design“But what effect on productivity can I expect?” This question is commonlyasked when improvements to the office environment are suggested. Businessmanagers want to know that investing in office design will save money, causeemployees to produce more, and improve organizational productivity.However, it is challenging to provide a realistic estimate of the effect onorganizational productivity. That there is an effect is undeniable, and it beginsto be identifiable when the connections between productivity, employees andoffice environments are examined.What is Productivity?An organization’s productivity is thevalue of its output (the products andservices it provides) relative to the valueof its input (the costs incurred to runthe business). The primary aim for anorganization is to decrease its costs andincrease its output so that it can be asprofitable as possible.Output - The Value of Products andServices: Often when people thinkabout productivity, they consider onlythe output, and in particular the amount that individual workers produce.However, individual productivity is only part of the picture, and it can bedifficult to measure what individuals produce. In the past, many office jobswere well-defined and repetitive, like those of data entry clerks or typists intyping pools. This made output from these jobs relatively easy to measure andcompare – i.e. the number of forms processed, or the number of characterstyped. Researchers can still measure single tasks like these, or they can studyother office work components such as reading comprehension, text editing,summarizing text, or short-term memory. These skills and activities are usefulindicators when studying employee behaviours. However, these performancemeasures no longer translate easily into productivity because their importancein different jobs varies widely. They represent only a portion of what modern5