Joseph Murray, Grand Valley State University Your Garden Gloves\" is a small gar

Question

Joseph Murray, Grand Valley State University

Your Garden Gloves" is a small gardening business located in Michigan. The company plants and maintains flower gardens for both commercial and residential clients. The company was founded about five years ago, and has since grown substantially, averaging about 10 new clients and one new employee a year. The company currently employs eight seasonal employees who are responsible for a certain number of clients.

Each morning crews are assigned to jobs by the owner. Crew sizes range from two to four workers. Crew size and composition are a function of the square footage of the garden and requirements of the job. The owner feels that large jobs should be assigned to crews of four workers in order to complete the job in a reasonable amount of time.

From time to time, the owner noticed that some jobs, especially the largest ones, took longer than she had estimated, based on the square footage of the garden space involved. The owner's son, Joe, decided to investigate. He kept records of job times and crew sizes, and then used those records to compute labor productivity. The results were:

The company operates on a small profit mar-gin, so it is especially important to take worker productivity into account.

Which crew size had the highest productivity per worker? Which crew size had the lowest productivity per worker? What are some possible explanations for these results? 250 words?

Explanation / Answer

Crew size 4 has the highest productivity per worker of 7,860 square feet per day, which is the highest of the three crew sizes. Crew size 2 has the lowest productivity per worker of 4,234 square feet per day.

The company is in the business of planting and maintaining flower gardens for both commercial and residential clients. The company has seasonal employees. Jobs of different sizes require different crew size and different time duration to complete the jobs. The owner has noticed that large jobs require more time than expected to complete. The possible explanation for higher productivity of large crew sizes, is because of the nature of jobs. Larger jobs require coordination greater among workers and output increases miultifold, because of the combined effort of the workers. For larger jobs, it is possible for workers to divide the work among them, so that each worker performs limited part of the overall job, hence each worker's work becomes repetitive kind of work, which makes it faster to complete because of the learning effect. So each worker is able to perform more work in same time, as compared to smaller jobs with a small crew size, where every worker has to perform multiple variety of jobs, which becomes more time consuming because of the non-repetitive nature of work. This is the possible reason why large crews performing large jobs have a higher productivity per worker, as compared to small crews performing smaller jobs.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse J
• Subjects

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.