Time to Productivity

What time to productivity means

Time to productivity (زمن بلوغ الإنتاجية) is the period between an employee starting work and reaching the usual performance for their role. The period begins where another indicator ends. That indicator is time to fill, taken as ending on the start date: the employee who has started has closed the vacancy, but has not yet made up for its effect.

Taken together, the two periods describe the full effect of someone leaving a job. The first says how long the job stayed without a holder, and the second says how long it stayed with a holder who had not yet reached the level. An organisation that measures only the first sees half of the effect, and may be seeing the shorter half.

As an indicator, time to productivity describes the role and the organisation together, not the employee alone. The same period grows longer in a role that was not described and shorter in one that was; it grows longer under a manager who finds no time for the newcomer and shorter under a manager who sets aside an hour a week, while the employee in both cases is the same person. Anyone who takes the figure as a verdict on the person hired attributes to them something that was not their doing.

The end point of time to productivity has to be defined first

The starting point is not in dispute: it is the start date. The end point needs a definition before it can be measured, because “the usual performance” can refer to three different references, and each gives a different period:

• The team median. Reached faster, but the reference moves whenever the team changes, so an employee may reach it because a colleague has declined.
• The highest performance in the team. Reached much more slowly, and possibly never, so it does not work as the end point of an indicator that is expected to close.
• A written level for the role. Described by known outputs, of the kind set out in performance standards, and unchanged when the membership of the team changes. More stable than the other two, and more costly to prepare.

The third reference is what makes the figure comparable between two periods and between two teams. An indicator whose reference is a moving median tells you where the employee stands among colleagues. What it does not give you is a period that can shorten or lengthen.

One further condition cannot be dropped: reaching the level has to be stable, not momentary. A single week in which the employee reaches the level does not close the indicator. The level can be required to hold for a period announced in advance, so that the indicator does not close during a quiet season.

The cost of the ramp to productivity

The cost here is not what the employee is paid, because that is paid in any case. What counts is what was not produced during the period. That cost is estimated by multiplying the length of the period by a monthly value for the role and by the share of output that was not produced.

Take a role whose monthly value has been estimated at SAR 18,000, and a time to productivity of 4 months during which the employee reaches, on average, 50 percent of the usual performance. What was not produced is 4 multiplied by 18,000 multiplied by 0.5, which comes to SAR 36,000.

If the period were shortened to 2.5 months with the same average, what was not produced would be SAR 22,500, a difference of SAR 13,500 from the first case.

The figures in these examples are assumed in order to show the structure of the calculation. In the sources we reviewed, we found no published reference for the Saudi market on which to base a typical time to productivity for any role or level.

The definition also does not establish that the value of a role equals its cost. The SAR 18,000 in the example is an estimate of monthly value; it is not the wage and it is not the cost per hire, and how to estimate that value in a particular organisation is not something the definition settles either.

Why the length of time to productivity is not enough on its own

This is where a problem appears in using the indicator as a target. Take the same role with a time to productivity of only 3 months, but with average performance during those months of 30 percent. What was not produced is 3 multiplied by 18,000 multiplied by 0.7, which gives SAR 37,800.

The shorter period cost 105 percent of the longer one. The reason is that the cost comes from the area under the curve, not from the length of its base, and the indicator measures only the base.

So an organisation that rewards a shorter period on its own pushes its teams towards declaring the level reached early, which shortens the figure and not the reality. The remedy is to report the indicator together with average performance during the period, or to use the value not produced, in riyals, as the indicator instead.

A second example makes the same point. Two curves both reach the level in four months with an average of 50 percent. The first rises gradually from zero to 100 percent; the second stays at zero for two months and then reaches 100 percent in the last two. The average is the same and so is the cost in the calculation, but their effect on the team differs. The second means two months in which nothing arrives, which is something to plan for when work is allocated, not something to discover in the second month.

The steady rise assumed for a curve like the first is a simplification for the sake of the calculation. The actual curve differs by role and by employee.

Where the performance share in time to productivity comes from

The calculation above needs two figures. The length of the period comes from two dates. The share of performance during the period is the figure that can end up being improvised, and roles fall into two cases here:

• A role with a countable output. Examples are the number of requests processed or cases closed. In that case the share is a direct division by the written level for the role, and it can be recorded monthly without any judgement involved.
• A role without a countable output. Here the share becomes a human estimate, and it works only under three constraints: it is taken on a fixed, published scale; it is anchored to the written level, not to how the employee appears to their manager; and it is taken on fixed dates, not whenever the figure happens to be needed.

An estimate gathered retrospectively at the end of the period does not work at all, because whoever knows the employee has reached the level sees the earlier months in that light. The difference between a monthly estimate kept on record and an estimate recalled four months later is not a difference in accuracy. The second estimate is not a measurement.

Time to productivity across a cohort, not one person

The period for a single employee gives nothing to build on, because it can reflect any number of individual reasons. The figure belongs to a cohort: people hired in the same period into similar roles.

Reporting by cohort carries a practical caution. Take 9 people hired in one quarter, of whom 8 reached the level in 3 months and one reached it in 9 months. The mean is 24 plus 9, divided by 9, which is 3.67 months, while the median is 3 months. The mean exceeds the median by about 22 percent, and one case produced that gap.

For that reason the median is shown together with the number of people who exceeded a published period, not the mean alone. The outlying case is worth examining individually. Its cause may lie in the role rather than the person, and the role may not have been described at the time the person was hired into it.

Internal moves need a separate time to productivity figure

An employee who moves into the role from inside the organisation starts with knowledge that a newcomer from outside lacks: they know whom to ask and how things get done, and they bring working relationships already in place. The same employee also starts with a burden that an external hire does not carry, namely the expectation that they already know, and so they may be left without any preparation.

Mixing the two groups in one average produces a figure that describes neither. Internal moves are therefore reported separately from external hiring, and each is compared with its own earlier periods.

What shortens time to productivity, and what does not

• Everything the employee needs, arranged before the first day. Permissions, tools and access to the material they will work on. Delays here create days in which nothing is produced for a reason unrelated to the employee, and because such delays are simple to put right, they can be measured first.
• A sequence of tasks, not one large batch. A small, complete task handed over early can produce faster learning than long attendance on other people’s tasks.
• A named person to go to. Guaranteed time for questions is better than an open door nobody knocks on. Setting this up is part of employee onboarding.
• A written description of the role before hiring. Someone who does not know exactly what is expected spends the first weeks working it out, and working it out is slower than reading it.

Other steps fill the time without shortening the period: more training hours in the first week, and a large number of introductory meetings. These produce no output against which reaching the level could be measured. The same applies to assigning a large piece of work early, with delivery expected after two months, because that delays the first signal of where the employee stands until after half the period has gone.

Whether a shorter time to productivity improves the retention rate is a separate question. In the sources we reviewed, we found no measurement of such an effect for the Saudi market.

Time to productivity beside quality of hire, cost per hire and probation

• Quality of hire. It describes the level an employee reached; time to productivity describes the period it took to get there. Two employees who reach the same level over different periods are equal on the first measure and differ on the second.
• Cost per hire. It is counted up to the start date, and time to productivity begins there. Adding the two into one figure combines a cost that was paid with a cost that was not.
• Probation. It has its own provisions under the Saudi Labor Law (نظام العمل) and does not measure how long an employee takes to reach the level. Probation may end before the employee reaches the level, or after the employee has reached it, and confusing the two means a contractual decision gets taken on the strength of a management indicator.

Before time to productivity is measured

Three things are written down before the first measurement. What level counts as reaching productivity, and which outputs describe it? How long must that level hold to count as stable? Who decides that it has been reached, and on what evidence?

A fourth question is put to the indicator after a year of use. Did the figure fall because onboarding improved, because the definition of reaching the level became looser, or because the people hired that year were closer to the role from the start? All three show the same direction on a chart, and only one of them is an achievement.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.

Related terms

• Employee Onboarding
• Cost per Hire
• Performance Standards
• Retention Rate
• Employee Growth Rate