SmartWoW – constructing a tool for knowledge work performance analysis

Abstract

Purpose-New Ways of Working (NewWoW) refers to a novel approach for improving the performance of knowledge work. The idea is to seek innovative solutions concerning facilities, information technology tools and work practices in order to be able to "work smarter, not harder". In order to develop work practices towards the NewWoW mode there is a need for an analytical management tool that would help assess the status of the organization's current work practices and demonstrate the impacts of development initiatives. This paper introduces such a tool. Design/methodology/approach-Constructive research approach was chosen to guide the development of the SmartWoW tool. The tool was designed on the basis of previous knowledge work performance literature as well as on interviews in two knowledge-intensive organizations. The usefulness of the tool was verified by applying it in four organizations. Findings-SmartWoW is a compact questionnaire tool for analyzing and measuring knowledge work at the individual level. The questionnaire consists of four areas: work environment, personal work practices, well-being at work and productivity. As SmartWoW is a standardized tool its results are comparable between organizations. Research limitations/implications-SmartWoW was designed a pragmatic managerial tool. It is considered possible that it can be valuable as a research instrument as well but the current limited amount of collected data does not yet facilitate determining its usefulness from that perspective. Originality/value-This paper makes a contribution to the existing literature on knowledge work measurement and management by introducing an analytical tool which takes into account the NewWoW perspective.

What Predicts Software Developers’ Productivity?

“…We deemed the question acceptable for our purposes because the respondents' considerations when answering the questions were congruent with our expectations about the meaning of productivity, encompassing issues regarding workflow, work output, being in the zone or flow, happiness, goals achieved, coding efficiency, progress, and minimizing waste. Although we do not analyze them in this paper, the survey also included four additional, narrower measures of productivity, drawn from prior work [2], [4], [5].…”

“…The first source we used was Pavalin and colleagues' instrument, which the authors derived from a literature review of performance measurements for knowledge workers [4]. The standardized survey instrument, called Smart-WoW, was fielded at four organizations, and encompass aspects of the physical workspace, the virtual workspace, the social workspace, personal work practices, and well-being at work.…”

“…To reduce these to a manageable number of questions that respondents could answer without significant fatigue [17], we used the following criteria for inclusion, as illustrated at the center of Figure 1: 1) Eliminate duplicates. For instance, both Smart-WoW [4] and Meyer and colleagues [15] discuss goal setting as an important productivity factor. 2) Condense similar factors.…”

“…3) Favor factors with clear utility. For instance, Smart-WoW [4] includes the factor Workers have [the] opportunity to see each other's calendar At Google, this is universally true and unlikely to change, so the factor has little utility.…”

The impact of workplaces and self-management practices on the productivity of knowledge workers

“…In total, 998 responses were collected, the response rate was 47 per cent. The online questionnaire has been developed by Palvalin et al (2015) and validated by Palvalin (2017).…”