20 Types of Productivity

John Spacey, updated on March 25, 2021

Productivity is the rate of output that is created for a unit of input. It is used to measure how much you get out of an hour worked or a dollar of investment. The following are factors that are tend to improve productivity.

Automation

Automating labor intensive tasks to improve costs, speed and quality. May also reduce risks related to human error.

Best Practices

Following the best known way to do something unless you can improve upon it.

Competition

Competition is widely viewed as the root of economic productivity. In other words, if a firm or employee has no competition they have less incentive to be productive. In some cases, people are inspired by their work and can be highly productive without being pushed by competitive forces.

Culture

Corporate culture has a broad and deep impact on productivity. For example, values, habits and norms such as openly sharing information and treating each other with respect typically improves employee work output.

Efficiency

Eliminating inefficiencies in processes, practices and work habits is a common source of productivity gains.

Fail Well

Fail well is the design of activities so that if they should fail, they fail quickly, cheaply and safely.

Work Environment

Offices and other work spaces that are healthy, safe and aesthetically pleasing. Stimulating social environments and quiet spaces may both play a role in productivity.

Flow

Flow is a state of uninterrupted mental concentration that is considered important to knowledge work. Flow is the opposite of multitasking, or an attempt to quickly bounce from one thing to the next such as developing code, talking on the phone and watching a movie at the same time.

Innovation

Innovation is the creation of something new that has value. It is often used to find labour saving techniques and devices that boost productivity.

Knowledge

Access to knowledge can improve work results and prevent knowledge workers from repeating efforts.

Prioritization

Working on your highest priority items first tends to boost your output.

Quality

Focusing on quality boosts the value of your work and may help avoid time consuming future problems. For example, each hour spent improving product quality may save ten hours of customer service work.

Reuse

Reusing materials, equipment and knowledge contributes to efficiency.

Risk Management

Risk management has an impact on productivity in areas such as business strategy and project management. A failed strategy or project can set back the productivity of an entire organization.

Sharing

Sharing information and resources such as technology between teams. It is surprisingly common for teams to reproduce a document, technology or database that already exists within an organization.

Skills

Skills directly related to productivity. For example, an highly skilled computer programmer may solve problems with code in hours that might take a less skilled developer weeks.