Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive survey of workplace productivity key performance indicators (KPIs) used in the office context. Academic literature from the past 10 years has been systematically reviewed and contextualized through a series of expert interviews.
Design/methodology/approach – The authors present a systematic review of the literature to identify KPIs and methods of workplace productivity measurement, complemented by insights semi-structured interviews to inform a framework for a benchmarking tool. In total, 513 papers published since 2007 were considered, of which 98 full-length papers were reviewed, and 20 were found to provide significant insight and are summarized herein.
Findings – Currently, no consensus exists on a single KPI suitable for measuring workplace productivity in an office environment, although qualitative questionnaires are more widely adopted than quantitative tools. The diversity of KPIs used in published studies indicates that a multidimensional approach would be the most appropriate for knowledge-worker productivity measurement. Expert interviews further highlighted a shift from infrequent, detailed evaluation to frequent, simplified reporting across human resource functions and this context is important for future tool development.
Originality/value – This paper provides a summary of significant work on workplace productivity measurement and KPI development over the past 10 years. This follows up on the comprehensive review by B. Haynes (2007a), providing an updated perspective on research in this field with additional insights from expert interviews.
Introduction
In the knowledge worker context, there is increasing interest in improving worker and team productivity, as human resources form the highest share of expenses and generate the majority of the organization’s income. Despite significant research correlating indoor environmental conditions on productivity in education and healthcare fields, there is a paucity of research on productivity measurement in the knowledge worker context. Since the last systematic review on this topic (Haynes, 2007), there has been a widespread adoption of information technology that has increased the incidence of hoteling/hot-desking, flexible hours and remote working (Cole et al., 2014), and it encouraged a shift to activity based workplaces (Wohlers and Hertel, 2017). Concurrently, the induction of millennials into the workforce has resulted in a desire for increased feedback frequency (Walden et al., 2017), shifting appraisals and other performance management from infrequent, punctuated benchmarking to near real-time data acquisition to inform continuous improvement. This literature review contributes to the ongoing discourse regarding workplace productivity, providing new insights, both from the literature and from interviews with industry experts, to provide an up-to-date holistic perspective on productivity measurement of knowledge workers.
Conclusions and implications for workplace productivity measurement
Since the review completed by Haynes (2007a), there has been a diversity of research in workplace productivity within the office context. The 20 papers reviewed have indicated a series of dominant workplace productivity KPIs and metrics. While significant future research is required to develop and test a multidimensional tool capturing these aspects, the literature review and insight from expert interviews has informed a theoretical framework for office worker productivity.
