Employee productivity the lowest in 40 years: What could be the reasons?

Very good initiation Inani, yes, we have discussed a lot about how to improve employee productivity but never discussed the reasons behind the low performance. So, its a very nice initiation from your side. In my view, these days, organisations are showing high expectations from the employees just after the recession is over because of which employees are facing depression in the organisation. Moreover, in the race of coming out of the recession as soon as possible, companies are showing least care towards an employee as an individual and making them work like machines which is another reason for employee depression. Because of this, their performance is falling...

Recently, the whole world saw a huge recession in which many employees lost their jobs. Though markets are coming out of that situation now, but the problem is, in this gap of one year, many employees have lost their skills. Those who haven't have been overloaded with projects because of which they are not able to show their 100% in the work resulting in low productivity.

Lack of clarity in what constitutes a deliverable where the results are intangible could be a major reason. In software (IT), the product is a vision and the building blocks are all intangible - how many lines of code? How many function points?  No wonder very little is really measured apart from the time that is taken and persons working. How do you define productivity then and say it is higher or lower?

I think after the recession many companies are just filling the voids by selecting the wrong candidates.Employees might not get their interest of work.They are interested or not for that work but they are just looking for job.After get selected they might not be able to fulfill the expectation.Hence low productivity.Actually work is not being done by the right person,right person should get the right work.

I agree with Nikhil that organizations are now a days expecting sometime unrealistic growth and objectives from the employee along with unfavourable work environment.

To add some more points I think internal policies of the organization are also the reason of lowest productivity of employees..what is happenning is manager are aligning the MBOs of the organization to the employees MBOs for the year they are responsible for which is totally mismatch as far as working is concerned...In most of the organization the people sitting in managerial positions are  lacking the knowledge and are not so competent enough to understand the competency level of their workforce which result in poorly aligning the goal of the organiztion to that with the employee which ultimately end up in poor performance , bitter relation with the management....

Mismanagement is one of the main reasons for the slow down of employee productivity.  Things can be planned, acordingly try to achive your target. Always planned tragets are not achivable even if well planning is there.  Work as per planning is executed by everyone, still bcoz of mismangement individuals productivity becomes low.

The non availability of skilled employees in the industry is the mail problem.As many deserving people lost their job in recession in the other hand people who are having good contacts with their seniors they were saved by them.so i feel the hr people should reshuffle the whole thing.

they should again start picking from market as there exist lot of skilled & talented people in market who are still jobless.

The answer is me and in part, I have contributed to the situation...This is primarily an inward looking question and it definitely deserves certain amount of introspection...May be, we settled for "AVERAGE" as our standard so the bar needs to be raised.(And yes we took average perks home folks-- That is the correlation) I think that is the only way we will improve the situation by setting high standards for ourselves.

If one joins a job ,he should join because he likes the job, the job exploits his potential, it is his/her dream job, not becoz it pays him/her more or he/her is too cowardly to pursue his dream job. 

Increased Usage of Social Networking Sites at Work - This hampers a lot.  Facebook in particular.

Uninteresting work - People are finding their job less interesting and boring

Low Motivation - Folks lack motivation due to workplace politics, Unfriendly environment.

What we are discussing is based on some survey of employees of developed nations where productivity has declined due to the economic recession there. What developing countries like China, India have seen in the past decades (especially in the last one) is an increase in productivity which is one of the reasons why there is outsourcing(without quality of work there wouldnt' have been any outsourcing to these destinations). There was already a fair good amount of productivity in these countries, but which has gone down a notch due to depression (psychological which was due to economic depression).

Anyways we can't go on generalizing based on a survey of a small subset.

I feel employee being only paid for his/her work is not the only remuneration one expects from his work.  More then monetary payment an employee also expects a piece of Appreciation from his immediate and higher subordinate(s) and i feel this is lacking in most of the upcoming organizations and has become an major concern over employees productivity over his/her work. ..... Manish N 

Cheers!!

All the above ideas put forth have valid points but they didn't occur all of a sudden.All these factors were already existing even 40 years before also.The only thing that has changed recently the sense of insecurity that has crept in due to the recession.Insecurity of job has led not only to a high level of frustration and lack of concentration but  also to depression in many cases.In such a state of mind productivity is bound to drop.

Management by participation promotes self motivation and make the employee involved and committed .

The coporate world should encourage employyes to indulge in this type of managemnt.

It will promote mutual respect and faith and ensures synergy in the work place

In modern world the emphasis is given on proper training individual rather than proper education. This act as one of the most important drawback of education due to which the industry and economy suffers. I am in favor of training but before them educate them so they must know what the thing is. Nowadays companies and education institutes donot emphasis on proper skill identification they emphasis on marks, grades, backgrounds,etc. This allows them to select bookworm and persons with high grades and no education. They memorize,get good grades and get easy chance to enter industry but what after that they are enable to benefit anyone. So this is a reason for employees less productivity.