Question

An office manager is concerned with declining productivity. Despite the fact that she regularly monitors her clerical staff four times each day—atAM,AM,PM, and again atPM—office productivity has declinedpercent since she assumed the helm one year ago. Would you recommend that the office manager invest more time monitoring the productivity of her clerical staff? Explain.

Short answer

I would not recommend that the manager spend more time supervising her employees, but she should rather change the way she supervises.

Step-by-step solution

Recommending the office manager

I would not recommend that the manager spend more time supervising her employees, but rather change the way she supervises. Throughout the year that she has been in office, she has established a routine in which at ,. she goes to supervise her staff.This routine makes it predictable and employees have incentives to not work or lower their productivity during hours when it is known for sure that she will not supervise.

Explanation

Since her supervising hours have become predictable, she needs to pull the trigger and change her strategy by monitoring at random hours and different numbers of times a day, which will make workers need to be working most of their time and thus increase their productivity since they will not know when the office manager will supervise.