Illustrative image.

Efficiency is classically defined as the measure of productivity per unit of time and is therefore traditionally linked to the ‘work attitude’ of the employee, the quality of management that provides for a strong ‘supervision’, and the system of ‘performance evaluation’ that was expected to be free of personal bias or favouritism. There has been a conceptual advancement in the understanding of these roots of efficiency.

The importance of workplace environment is now recognised in terms of not only the adequacy of physical ‘equipment’ provided to the employee but also the harmony and peace in the atmosphere that would add to the ease of maintaining a ‘work-life’ balance for the individual. This combination helped the employee to work with concentration — aided by freedom from mental distractions — and thus added to the output against time. The concept of supervision has also changed from the perception of a senior breathing down one’s neck to a boss who nurtured the junior and made himself or herself available for providing guidance if sought by the latter.

The modern system of business ensures adequate ‘training on the job’ for the employee on one hand and encourages ‘participative management’ emerging out of the conviction that the entire hierarchy of the enterprise is wedded to the same organisational goals, on the other. In ‘performance evaluation’ three things become crucially important. One is rooted in the mandate of the ‘age of information’ that one has to be a well-informed person to achieve success in any field. This is because only knowledge-based decision-making showed the right path. In judging one’s performance, the boss should have complete knowledge of the subordinate — as an employee with a given work attitude, as a human being with emotional content and as a person who has burdens and responsibilities beyond the workplace.

An arid, output-related evaluation as per prescribed paradigms is to be tempered with the correct knowledge of the circumstances of the employee that might have caused an unexplained shortfall. Secondly, the senior should have an astute ability to make out the difference between ‘brilliance’ and ‘diligence’ and give due importance to both — some people may look very bright and busy but produce very little at the end of the day. Last but not least, the boss with a reputation of being transparent and fair in evaluating the subordinates, retains his or her image as a leader — biases and favouritism in making evaluations destroy that image often without the leader even knowing it.

An important task of Human Resource development people in an enterprise today is to work out arrangements for up-skilling those who were not lacking in effort but who had the potential to enhance the output further through special training. Cost-effectiveness is still not fully built into business operations since a generally prevalent notion is that investment has a direct line to growth and profitability — this substantially drove expenditure on sales promotion through attractive advertisements to cope up with a highly competitive world.

It is not adequately realised that practising cost-effectiveness — even when funds were available — is an instrument of profitability since it helps to keep up the given level of productivity with lesser use of resources — man, material or money. If an existing operation can be handled with three persons instead of four deployed at present or if a process is done in seven stages but could as well be completed in five steps, then the resource-saving option must be chosen.

The conceptual understanding involved here is that cost-effectiveness was in fact increasing the efficiency of the employees which is a fundamental reason why productivity would increase as mentioned in the beginning, in terms of ‘time’ taken by the employee. Time in today’s competitive environment is now considered the new ‘resource’ besides the traditional assets of manpower, material resources and funds. If in practising cost-effectiveness, the investment-output ratio tilted in favour of the latter because of the lesser use of traditional resources, that was an additional gain. All of this shows that the awareness of ‘efficiency’ as the key to growth has acquired a new-found importance.

The advent of Information Technology introducing instant online communications and business transactions, has pushed competitiveness to a global level and provided early bird advantage to those who can press data analytics into use for getting a peep into what lay ahead in terms of both ‘opportunities’ and ‘risks’. Artificial Intelligence is a new frontier of Information Technology that has opened up a huge requirement of skilled manpower, unfolded for all businesses new areas of growth and thrown up a debate on its adverse impact on employment.