[Music] hihow welcome to take in the biz in this tutorial we're going to take a look at efficiency how we might try and improve it and we're gonna really focus in on labor productivity and we'll put a link in the top hand corner there to a video that shows you how to calculate the labor productivity of an organization but in this tutorial we're gonna concentrate on how we might try and improve that labor productivity so efficiency is important firms want to try and be as efficient as they possibly can because efficiency affects costs so if a firm can be more efficient essentially what it means is that it can create its products and maintain the same quality standards that it has had previously but now it can produce them cheaper efficiency is about minimizing the costs of producing one of your units of output one way we can do that is through improving labor productivity labor productivity examines how much work we are able to squeeze on average out of each of our employees and it makes sense the more work we can get out of each of the member of staff that we've recruited the lower our costs are going to be we're going to get greater output from each of our workers and if we're paying them per hour or per month the more we can squeeze out of them the more we can split their wages or their salaries across a greater level of output so let's have a look at how we might try and improve that labor productivity well one of the main ways might be through the investment in training maybe we can get employees to produce more per hour more per day more per month by improving their skills if we can equip them with a greater skill level maybe they can work faster maybe they can get more done in a given time period so by training our members of staff we might be able to skill them up so that they can work on a more rapid basis allowing us to get more work per day per hour out of each of our employees now another way the Memorial Zoo is a little bit more kami maybe through redesigning people's jobs we can actually free them up to be more productive and get more done in a given time period now this might be particularly true in manufacturing firms if they find a way of redesigning the physical mechanics of how people aren't doing their jobs by redesigning people's workstations maybe redesigning the best way of completing a task maybe even going back to some tailor astir principles doing some time and motion studies ascertaining the most efficient movements to complete a task it might be that we can get people working quicker we can get them working quicker than they will be able to bang out more units per given time period so training and job redesign might be two ways that we can strike at the heart of labor productivity get people getting more done in the same amount of time now another way we might be able to do it might be to look at why people aren't getting more work done maybe people aren't working as fast maybe they're not producing as much as we deem physically possible and that must be down to their motivation to their willingness to produce work so maybe another simple technique to increase the amount of work the amount of output that we're squeezing out of our work force per given time period is to look at motivation and to look at rewards so maybe we can tweak or restructure the way we're motivating our staff maybe we could look at the way we're paying them maybe we could inject greater rewards into our production processes to give people greater still Millis to produce more so maybe we feel our labor productivity is a little bit low because people aren't working as hard or as fast as they could be to solve that we'd have to look at our motivation we'd have to look at our rewards find a way we might be able to do it is maybe people are productive as they could be because there's inefficiencies in the tools or the equipment or the technology that we're providing them with in order to do that job so maybe people aren't working as fast or as productively as they could be because they're using outdated technology maybe it's technology that slow cumbersome it frequently breaks those defaults in it so maybe an investment in new technology giving employees new machinery new equipment more efficient tools to do their jobs with might increase how much output they are able to generate per hour or per day so there we go we've got some different techniques that in our answers we could discuss as possible vehicles to driving up the labor productivity of an organization however if we want to write a really good answer we'll know that improving labour productivity isn't quite as simple as just rolling out some measures of doing so there might be difficulties with the implementation of each of these different ideas so the one we'll start with is whether the ideas we're using to increase our labor productivity might actually drive up the organization's costs for example if we're going to look at our our motivation and our pay in our reward mechanisms is that going to drive up the costs of the firm as we're having to provide financial incentives as a way of increasing labor productivity similarly with training that is probably going to come at a cost either we're gonna have to lose man-hours as we're taking workers off their production tasks in order to skill them up and train them or it might even be that we have to pay for outside training providers to come into the organization or for employees to go and complete them off the job training at a training center or additional qualifications to help improve their productivity all of these things may well come at a financial cost perhaps the biggest financial cost might even be the investment in new technology in order to try and increase the labor productivity so there's a definite question mark as we try to strive towards greater labor productivity might we in the process drive up the firm's costs next then we could look at is whether it might affect the quality of what we produce as well so in trying to improve labor productivity in trying to encourage workers to increase the amount of output they produce over a given time period might we be encouraging them to work quicker to produce more but maybe to cut corners maybe to produce at a lower level of quality and so we have to ask the question in trying to increase the productivity of our labor force do we run the risk of damaging the quality of the end product that they produce and if through improving our labor productivity we increase the number of defects the number of faulty products we produce or we lower the level of customer service that we're offering it might be that we've increased labor productivity but it's been to the detriment of our organization the other thing we might raise is a question mark is whether increasing labor productivity is actually something that would be warmly received by employees or whether it might be something that's met with resistance now if we're going to try and improve labor productivity and there's going to be some kind of financial incentive involved for employees then it's possible that this might be a mutually beneficial process the firm experiences greater levels of output per hour per day and employees financially benefit themselves but if we're trying to increase labor productivity using other methods maybe through the introduction of new technology or maybe through the Reid design of people's jobs it might be that employees resist that it might be something that they see that they're not directly benefiting from that they are not monetarily achieving any extra gains from and so it's plausible that they might resist the attempts the business is making to improve the labor productivity because they don't feel it benefits them in any way and in fact they're now having to work harder or work with new technology or a new design of job when they don't feel they're personally benefiting from it so it may be something that's met with resistance and can damage the labor and management relations in the organization so there's how we improve labor productivity importance remember there might be difficulties with that as well the important topic to revise for our a level exams good luck with your exam preparation don't forget to keep on taking the biz you you you