Monitoring the productivity of staff is an important part of staff management. It can determine how users are performing, identify high performing staff and ones that may require additional training or support.

‍

Background Concepts and Definitions

• Items is a general term and represents different objects, depending on the Work Centre selected. Accessioning items represent cases; grossing items represent specimens, embedding items represent cassettes and sectioning and signout items represent slides.
• User Hour is a count of hours that a distinct user is present and working in a work centre. Every hour where an individual user was active would be counted as 1, even if they were only active on the work centre for 5 minutes that hour.
• User Utilisation looks at the proportion of work time in relation to the user hours. It is calculated by the sum of the work time divided by the user hours.
• Work Time looks at the actual effort time in 5 minute blocks. This data is captured by looking at the activity being completed at the work centre.

‍

Items per Hour and User Hours

The bar chart presents information on the Users performing work at the work centre, their average Items per Hour, and the total volume of User Hours. It identifies which users spent the most time at the work centres and their average output.

‍

‍

The average Items per Hour is also presented in a line chart depicting the trend over time. When filtered to a user, managers can quickly visualise an individual's output over time.

‍

‍

Hours Worked by Hour of Day

In the Hours Worked by Hour of Day chart, User Hours are displayed in a column and table format. It shows how the user hours are distributed over the course of the day and the week. This information is helpful to identify when the work centres are more active.

Like the other detailed capacity screens, the information can be filtered for individual users, allowing managers to assess work patterns down to the user level.

‍

‍

The example above presents the Hours Worked by Hour of Day for the Sectioning Work Centre, over a week. It demonstrates that for the work centre, the busy period over the selected week is between 9 AM and 12 PM, with Friday being the busiest.

‍

User Utilisation

Looking at the user hours on a work centre by the hour may not be enough information when monitoring productivity, it needs to be paired with User Utilisation which looks at their activity on the workstation during the User Hour. User Utilisation is calculated by looking at the actual effort time (Work Time) in the hour with 1.0 indicating full utilisation.

‍

‍

The example above demonstrates that for the work centre, the hours are well utilised with a lot of activity for the work centre.

‍