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U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

washingtonpost.com

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Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#501

Post by etempleton »

I will tell you why: People are changing jobs a lot. When you start a new job you are usually slow at almost everything. You don’t know where files are, you don’t fully understand what you are working on, you don’t know who to go to for a particular question and so on. Worse you slow everyone else down too.

Companies decided employees weren’t worth raises. Employees left. Companies need to value employees more with pay if they want them to stick around and keep all that institutional knowledge.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#502

Post by johndhi »

conductr wrote: post #110
lkrubner wrote: post #88

I've read that doctors now spend as much as 50% of their time documenting their work. Companies such as Epic, which provide the software that hospitals use to build databases of patient data, have been big winners in the new world of hospitals-depending-on-software. But did the doctors become more productive? By almost any measure, they became less productive. People in tech keep thinking more tech will solve problem…

I don’t think productivity was ever the goal of this software. It was to have a record that is standard, digital, transferable, etc. Doctors fought it as long as they could because they knew what it meant for them. I remember pretty early demos in early/mid 2000s when I was doing some clinical grunt work in college. I had written some software to make my department’s life easier so I was offered up as the hospital’s…

As someone who worked in the electronic health records industry, closely with design teams, and has thought more deeply about certain aspects of this problem than anyone else in history (not exaggerating), I think you're missing major factors.

First, yes, productivity was one of the goals of the forced move to electronic health records systems. The federal government passed the HITECH Act in 2009 creating economic incentives for doctors to switch to EHRs because it would be better for public health, Medicare billing, and also because it would supposedly unlock doctors to spend more time with patients and be more productive, via the use of technology.

The reason that third thing has failed, to my mind, is largely because the government, in the same act, required a HUGE list of requirements be met by the software designers making the EHRs. This list, by law, needs to be prioritized in scrums over customer requests and design thinking. Sometimes it makes good UX impossible.

Ironically, the government, hearing this feedback, actually added a new requirement to the list: "Safety-Enhanced Design" [0].

Go read that regulatory requirement and see if it makes any sense to you. That's why design sucks in EHRs.

[0] https://www.healthit.gov/test-method/safety-enhanced-design

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#503

Post by tqi »

jjk166 wrote: post #362

US Worker productivity is 0.7 standard deviations below its average over the last 3 years. It is 3.6% below all time high. It is higher now than at any point before July of 2020. YOY Productivity growth has dipped negative and then went back to positive 20 times in the past 22 years. To be concerned about the current level of productivity requires either the attention span or the intelligence of a goldfish. https://t…

> In the first half of 2022, productivity — the measure of how much output in goods and services an employee can produce in an hour — plunged by the sharpest rate on record.

Given the sharpness of the drop, the timing with wonkiness in a whole slew of other economic indicators, it's bizarre to me that the author (and experts interviewed) would immediately assume that something changed with workers vs the metric is behaving weirdly.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#504

Post by hnick »

StillBored wrote: post #242
conductr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think productivity was ever the goal of this software. It was to have a record that is standard, digital, transferable, etc. Doctors fought it as long as they could because they knew what it meant for them. I remember pretty early demos in early/mid 2000s when I was doing some clinical grunt work in college. I had written some software to make my department’s life easier so I was offered up as the hospital’s…

IMHO, this is because the people writting GUI's these days are mostly incompetent, or hamstrung by "web" technologies. Early GUI's didn't have the problem you describe because they were designed as discovery mechanisms to the underlying function. AKA, the idea was that after clicking File->Save a dozen times you would remember the keyboard accelerators displayed on the right hand side of the menu. Or if nothing else,…

I feel like the push to make software accessible (in a new-user, not disability, context) and intuitive has made complexity the enemy. Instead of having software that grows with the user's capability, features are hidden from the top layer of interactivity or just cut entirely.

I was at the post office here in Australia a few years ago and saw the screen. It was one of those DOS-era full screen red and blue text interfaces. She was flying through hotkeys and getting things done. People can learn, so much software treats them as infants.

And you know there's definitely someone looking at replacing that software with a modern GUI.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#505

Post by scarface74 »

asvitkine wrote: post #496
scarface74 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition of enterprise software is “the customer is not the user”. You don’t have to make the user happy, just the CxO.

Wouldn't productivity from better UI be something measurable that can be then advertised by vendors and extrapolated into savings for the customer? I feel like that could be a pretty compelling selling point to the CxOs.

How do you measure how much MS Teams sucks compared to Slack? All the CTO knows is that they have an enterprise license for Office along with Teams and the salesperson they talked to showed them how great it integrates with the rest of the suite.

In the EHR space, all the CMO (chief medical officer) cares about is it helps keep them in compliance. Why should they care if it’s hard for their office staff to use?

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#506

Post by shadowgovt »

WalterBright wrote: post #470
shadowgovt wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotes about corruption and mismanagement do not address the underlying point that government spending is not zero-sum. That hydrant was probably too expensive (maybe; insufficient data to say for sure). The damage if a fire breaks out and no municipal fire system is available in a modern city is catastrophic.

> Anecdotes I gave real examples, not hypotheticals. I never said government spending was zero-sum. > That hydrant was probably too expensive The bill was $10,000 for a $3,000 job. > The damage if a fire breaks out and no municipal fire system is available in a modern city is catastrophic. At $10,000 a pop there'll be a lot fewer hydrants installed, and hence greater risk of catastrophic fire.

Anecdotes aren't hypotheticals; they're single data points with insufficient signal to predict a trend or pattern.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#508

Post by propogandist »

cestith wrote: post #26
ep103 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During Covid, people were hiding in their homes, quarantined, with nothing to do but work. This year, companies expect workers to return to office, despite little change in conditions, except now we have to deal with all of the above issues you've just mentioned, AND the fact that employees have now proven they can work remotely perfectly well. It should neither be surprising that in a system where healthcare is tied…

All of what you've both said, plus the number of people who thought or still think COVID-19 is "no big deal" who now have a pulmonary deficiency and long-term mental fog.

good thing there's the safe and effective vaccine tested on mice and N number of boosters.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#509

Post by Trisell »

I would propose that part of the loss of productivity is the lack of staying power in employees. Employees are getting trained working a year or two and then moving on to something else.

The efficiencies derived by working 10-20 years in the same field and even the same position are lost with the modern workforce that barely gets trained to competency before leaving let alone staying long enough to build true efficiency and thus greater productivity.

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