As labor becomes more costly and emerges as a major bottleneck for many manufacturing and service industries, improving labor productivity is an obvious priority. Whether it’s the preparation time it takes for a restaurant worker to cook a meal, the time for an autoworker to install a component, the call duration for a customer service representative to resolve a problem, or the service time it takes a healthcare worker to administer a vaccine, when labor is scarce, time is critical. In such cases, improving labor productivity isn’t just a matter of reducing costs. Higher labor productivity in capacity-constrained operations has a direct effect on service level, revenue, and growth.

Accurately measuring the productivity of workers has become something of a lost art. Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Lost time is never found again.” So how are we supposed to keep track of how much labor time it takes to perform a particular task? Here are three ways to measure it.

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