SUMMARY

Knowledge-Worker Productivity
THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE

Submitted By – Group 5

Kanupriya – PGP10023
Pratik – PGP10039
Kanika – PGP10209
Chirag – PGP10244
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Abstract: This study revolves around the most valuable assets for company and how their productivity is changing.
This reading discusses the 6 factors that determine the productivity of knowledge workers and also covers different
perspectives of knowledge workers.

Introduction: The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most
valuable asset of a 21st-century institution, whether business or non-business, is its knowledge workers and their
productivity.

Knowledge workers are workers whose main capital is knowledge. From over a hundred year, researchers are
working on the term productivity of workers from considering that productivity can only be produced by working
harder and longer to considering productivity as an extraneous factor and not a part of equation. There are
enormous theories on productivity and this productivity of manual worker defines the economy status of country
like emerging or developed.

Productivity of Manual Work: Taylor’s principle revolves around analysing task, then elimination of unwanted
motion, converting remained motion to simplest way of doing and putting it up as job. These mythologies have
been changing not only in terms of name but also process. Taylor showed that there is no such thing like skill in
manual work and applies knowledge to work. Taylor supported that labour should be paid according to productivity
and not input (hours of work). All the major theories around productivity includes Taylor’s method as base.

Later the paper talks about the world wars and its impact on concepts of productivity which was considered as
scientific management during world war and countries used rationalisation for the training. Even the economic
development worked on the theory of Industrial management based on Taylors principles.

The Future of Manual Worker Productivity: There are equal or more opportunities in the developed countries to
organise non-manufacturing production on the production principles. There is similarly a gigantic measure of
knowledge work—including work requiring profoundly progressed and altogether hypothetical information—that
incorporates manual operations.

Knowledge Worker Productivity: Factors determining knowledge worker productivity

1. Task: The first requirement in tackling knowledge work is to find out what the task is so as to make it
possible to concentrate knowledge workers on the task and to eliminate everything else.
2. Autonomy: It demands that the responsibility for their productivity should be imposed on the individual
knowledge workers themselves.
3. Innovation
4. Continuous Learning
5. Quality and Quantity: Both Matters
6. Treated as Asset: Productivity requires knowledge worker to be treated as asset and not cost
Knowledge Worker as Capital Asset:

Economic theories and most business practice consider manual to be as an expense. To be profitable, knowledge
worker must be viewed as a capital resource. Costs need to be controlled and diminished. Resources should be
made to develop.

However, short of the costs of turnover, rehiring, retraining, and so on, the manual worker is still being seen as a
cost. This is definitely not true for knowledge work. Employees who do manual work do not own the means of
production. They may, and often do, have a lot of valuable experience, but that experience is valuable only at the
place where they work. It is not portable. Knowledge workers, however, own the means of production. Everything
between their ears are portable. Management’s job is to preserve the assets of the institution in its care.

The Technologists: Knowledge workers who do both manual and knowledge work are known as technologist. The
technologist group also contains large numbers of people in whose work knowledge is relatively subordinate—
though it is always crucial. They include the great majority of

• Health-care workers: lab-technicians; rehabilitation technicians

• Technicians in imaging such as X-ray, ultrasound, magnetic-resonance imaging
• Dentists and all dental-support people.
• automobile mechanics and all kinds of repair and installation people

They provide competitive advantage to developed countries. Only by educating technologists can the developed
countries still have a meaningful and lasting competitive edge. To increase knowledge-worker productivity,
increasing the productivity of technologists deserves to be given high priority. These technologists had to define
what “satisfaction” means. (e.g. AT&T – customer satisfaction). Technologists are fully responsible for customer
satisfaction and delivering quality.

Knowledge Work as System: Profitability of the knowledge worker will quite often require that the work itself be
rebuilt and be made aspect of a system as U.S. Caterpillar Company restructured the operations to gurantee
immediate repairs.

Managing Knowledge Workers: Requires changes in basic attitude on the part of individual as well as whole
organisation

1. Finding area of organisation where there are receptive knowledge workers

2. Working consistently and patiently with this group
Reclassifying the reason of the employing organization and of its management as both fulfilling legitimate
proprietors, (for example, investors) and fulfilling the proprietors of the human capital that gives the association
its wealth-producing power—that is, satisfying the knowledge workers. Progressively, the capacity of organisation
and not just of businesses—to endure will come to rely upon their "comparative advantage" in making the
knowledge worker more profitable. The capacity to pull in and hold the best of the knowledge workers is the first
and most major precondition.