[Opinion] Some Useful Tips to Improve Your Productivity

▲Kim Chang-hee, Professor, Department of Business Administration, Incheon National University

When someone asks me what my major is, I answer Business Administration, and when they ask about my specialization, I usually say it involves measuring productivity. After such exchanges, I occasionally get the question, "How can productivity be improved?" This is because productivity is an important topic for both individuals and companies.

Productivity can be simply expressed as output relative to input. Generally, in a company, productivity refers to operating expenses or fixed assets invested to produce a certain output. The output can be the quantity of products or the number of services provided, but the most comprehensive measure is sales revenue. For individuals, it is similar: input factors include time and monetary costs, and the results achieved through these inputs are considered outputs. In summary, productivity is defined by how much was invested and whether the return on that investment was cost-effective relative to time.

To achieve high productivity, there are two approaches: reducing the amount of input while keeping output constant, or increasing output while maintaining the same level of input. Of course, if one can reduce input while increasing output, productivity will improve even more. However, focusing only on input and output often causes two important factors to be overlooked. In today’s column, I want to discuss these two factors.

First is the importance of 'measurement.' When visiting many companies and factories, I find that they often do not make sufficient efforts to accurately measure their performance or input levels. Sometimes, they even increase input by measuring unimportant factors, which hinders productivity. So, what should be measured and what should not? The answer lies in purposefulness and cost-effectiveness.

Purposefulness can be a dream or future aspiration for an individual, and a strategy or positioning for a company. It is necessary to select elements that align with this purpose. Next, when measuring these elements, it is helpful to measure all factors meticulously. However, this is not cost-effective. For example, in exit polls conducted by media outlets to predict election results, surveying every voter who leaves the polling station would yield more accurate results, but sampling is used precisely because of cost-effectiveness.

In companies, measuring elements too meticulously can require a lot of manpower and costs, which may actually lower overall productivity. For students studying for exams, collecting various past exam questions or notes from seniors to plan their study is good, but if all this material is gathered just one hour before the exam, it would be more harmful than helpful.

Next is 'relativity.' Improving productivity is, of course, desirable for both individuals and companies. But if you improve your productivity by 10% while others improve theirs by 20%, can we truly call this a productivity improvement? For this, it is important to set accurate benchmarking targets or comparison groups. Just as a student ranked 30th in their class cannot be compared to the top student in the entire school, setting an appropriate comparison group and choosing slightly better benchmarking targets step by step is the shortcut to improving productivity.

Everyone talks about improving productivity and tries to measure it. However, efforts that do not consider purposefulness and cost-effectiveness can actually hinder productivity, and efforts without proper comparison groups or benchmarking targets can lead to discouragement. If you truly want to improve productivity, first clearly define your purpose and goals. Then exclude other factors and manage only the indicators that can purely achieve those purposes and goals, and benchmark against targets slightly ahead of you. Remember that productivity improvement efforts leading to productivity decline are due to overlooking these two fundamental points.

Changhee Kim, Professor, Department of Business Administration, Incheon National University

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.