I was reading an interesting commentary entitled “Defining Productivity for the Knowledge Age” that was published yesterday by Jonathan Spira, CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex Research. It is a thought-provoking post about how we measure what we do as knowledge workers.
When the focus of the world’s economy was on making stuff, it was pretty straightforward. Every worker could count what he or she did in a given period and know – definitively – how it was going. If someone introduced a new process, technique or machine, he or she would know right away whether it had helped or hurt. More stuff = better. Pretty simple.
Now when we push around emails and electronic documents all day long, measuring productivity is tricky. As Mr. Spira wrote, “It will probably be decades before we fully understand even what questions have to be asked.”
At Zapproved, we think a great deal about how to achieve productivity gains. From our perspective, we are creating tools that reduce the amount of time and number of emails needed to bring people to agreement. More importantly, we look at the intangibles: Was the quality of the decision better because of an open, transparent discussion? Was there less emotional stress involved? Did people feel better about the result? Did everyone remain accountable?
Yes, doing more “actions” every day is a way to measure productivity quantitatively. However, measuring the qualitative, or “soft,” impacts is a bigger challenge. We are confident we are accomplishing what we want Zapproved to do based on the steady stream of feedback we get from our user community.
Do you have ideas about the issue of productivity in our knowledge economy? Send us an email at myidea@zapproved.com and tell them to us or how you have found that Zapproved has improved your productivity.
Posted by Chris Bright 
