I need help interpretating numbers: Data Analysis

[u/Dangerous-Staff9172]

I work in healthcare.

The company I work for is looking at productivity and I am a People Manager.

I currently have a staff of 9 people who essentially make phone calls for most of the day.

Data and Maths people:

What would you feel would be the best representation for Productivity, in a formula form.

I have some numbers.

x would be completed calls. (any call that my staff gets through to the people for any specific time.)

y would be attempted calls. (any call that my staff makes but does a voice mail, etc.)

The company is looking for a productivity number of 120 per month.

I have higher productive people and lower productive people... but I need to evaluate them.

It is not as simple as "you must make 120 completed calls per month." My people have meetings, attempts, education, etc.

Any thoughts?

[u/GOBsMagicShow]

What are the calls for? Do we need a metric for quality, not just quantity?

[u/Dangerous-Staff9172 → u/GOBsMagicShow]

Bean counters are counting beans

[u/GOBsMagicShow → u/Dangerous-Staff9172]

I don't understand your answer

[u/Dangerous-Staff9172 → u/GOBsMagicShow]

The people who only count visits... are only counting visits.

My job is to help interpret the productivity to include other time spent.

[u/tboneotter]

What do you mean "They need a productivity number of 120 per month"? You need to create a metric that synthetically comes out to 120/month?

Three ways to do this:

• What the other commentator said - more math intensive, but technically a good productivity score.
• An actual metric KPI. For example, if the goal was to "resolve a case" it would be resolved cases/phone calls answered. Pros: actually drives performance. Cons: 2 completed calls > 100 attempted
• Simple: [Time spent on the phone (dials and contacts)]/Hours worked in the month

"My people have meetings, attempts, education, etc." - yes, and this would impact their day-to-day call score, but over the course of a month it should be pretty standard? Calls/Hour I think is the simplest way to do it

[u/cognitiveStack]

Interesting. This sounds more like a KPI method question than it does a math question. These are the questions I would start with -

1. What is the desired outcome per call? Sales, patient check in etc.
2. Extension from above - what is the behavior you're trying to incentivize? As soon as you quantify effort down to a single number, expect people to try and gamify it.
3. Do different staff members have different capacity to make calls as part of their roles?
4. Do you understand what your high performers are doing to be high performers? Same with the low performers. Could be skill, capacity, motivation etc. Some things can be taught. not everything. There's always going to be performance variance among employees. But if there are just small things the high performers are doing that can be applied to your team, worth seeing if you can implement. E.g. Maybe the first 15 seconds of every call could be scripted?

Generally, a single metric (like total calls completed), is not going to be meaningful by itself and possibly MISLEADING. To get a full picture it's probably some function of all these data points:

• total available time
  
• total time making calls
  
• total attempts
  
• total calls completed
  
• outcome achieved (however that's defined)

And of course the downside of measuring all this (if you even can) is that it could come off like micromanagement.

Just my two cents - probably not as concise or formulaic as what you were looking for.

[u/pinkteapot3]

I’d avoid one raw call count. Track completed calls, attempts, productive hours, meetings, and education separately, then normalize calls by available work hours for a fairer comparison.