How is productivity measured?

On recent weekly update, you talked about how productivity has gone up since the recession, but wages stayed the same. I’m wondering how productivity is calculated. From my own experience, I’m not sure people are being more productive. I think it may be that quality is declining. I can give you a couple of examples. Our school district has a program for speech therapy for students which my son was in. It really helped him in elementary school. After the school budget was cut, they cut the number of speech therapists. There was much less individual attention given by the therapists because their workloads increased. I know some kids made less progress because of it. On paper, it would look like the program is the same, serving the same number of students. My own employer, a large nonprofit, cut about 30% of its staff. We did cut some programs, but other programs continued and people left were just scrambling to keep things going at a minimum. So I’m wondering how productivity numbers are measured. Is productivity even applicable for schools and nonprofits?


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  • Kathy Freeman
    published this page in Ask Prof. Wolff 2016-10-11 17:37:00 -0400

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