Prioritisation
Productivity measurement
Choose useful team productivity measures and interpret completed work alongside quality, changed demand and employee feedback.
Measure team productivity by defining the result people need, then examining what delivery requires. Completed-work counts can help, but read them alongside quality, waiting, changed demand and worker feedback. No single operational measure explains all of these.
National Productivity Indicators (Australia)
- ABS Productivity Statistics
- Used to assess economic performance across sectors.
- OECD Productivity Trends
- Benchmark for Australia’s productivity in global context.
- Australian Treasury Report
- Guides policy on productivity growth and measurement.
Start with a decision
Ask what the measure should help you decide. Are requests taking longer to reach customers? Is new work displacing commitments? Are completed reports returning for correction? Each question calls for different evidence.
Name the work type, its recipient and when the result becomes usable. Agree those boundaries with the people producing and receiving the work. A draft awaiting required approval and a report ready for its intended reader are at different stages.
A team's ticket or document count is a narrower operational measure. Dividing it by staff hours does not make it equivalent to a national productivity statistic: items differ in complexity and quality.
Pros and Cons of Using Completed Work Counts
- Pros
- Simple to track; useful for high-level progress monitoring.
- Cons
- Does not reflect complexity, quality, waiting stages or worker well-being.
Choose a small set of signals
| Signal | Useful question | Limit |
|---|---|---|
| Completed, usable items | What reached the intended recipient? | Items may differ in difficulty and later effect. |
| Cycle time | How long did comparable items take after the agreed start? | Elapsed time is not hands-on effort. |
| Planned versus completed results | Which commitments were delivered, changed or displaced? | A change is not automatically a failure. |
| Returns or corrections | What needed another pass after handover? | A return does not identify its cause. |
| Employee feedback | Where do workers experience friction or risk? | Perception is not an output count. |
Record the period, included work types and completion rule. Mark any change in definition before comparing periods. Otherwise, a change in recording may look like a change in performance.
Key Productivity Signals and Their Limitations
- Completed, usable items
- What reached the intended recipient?
- Cycle time
- How long did comparable items take after the agreed start?
- Planned versus completed results
- Which commitments were delivered, changed or displaced?
- Returns or corrections
- What needed another pass after handover?
- Employee feedback
- Where do workers experience friction or risk?
Investigate the work behind a change
If more requests were completed this month, check whether they were smaller, whether required checks were completed and whether unresolved work moved elsewhere. If completion slowed, examine the case mix and waiting stages before naming a cause.
Inspect relevant items and speak with the people who handled and received them. A few cases can expose a useful question, but they cannot establish a lasting effect across all work. Include work a count may miss, such as service coverage, prevention, specialist checks and help given to colleagues.
Tell workers what is recorded, who can see it and what decision it supports. Give them a way to correct a misleading status. Feedback about workload or pressure to rush deserves attention in its own right. A delivery dashboard cannot assess work health and safety risks by itself.
Finish with an action
At each review, ask what changed, what evidence supports the explanation and who can act. The response might be to clarify a completion rule, arrange an earlier approval, change accepted work or gather better evidence. Set a point to check the effect.
Revisit a measure if it encourages extra tickets, premature closure or substantial reporting work. Keep it while it improves decisions about usable work.
In this guide
- Measuring cycle time for recurring workDefine start and finish points, track comparable work and interpret cycle time without hiding open items or quality problems.
- Comparing planned work with completed outcomesReview original commitments, completed results and work added later without hiding approved changes or unfinished dependencies.
- Using employee feedback without treating it as objective outputAsk employees about workflow friction, interpret responses fairly and keep reported experience distinct from recorded output.
- Avoiding productivity metrics that reward shortcutsCheck productivity targets for shortcuts, inspect quality and displaced work, and revise measures that misrepresent results.
