How is productivity measured?

[Cadeaukatze]

I have just been catching up with the thread about French high streets and someone said French productivity is higher than in the UK. And earlier I was reading an article about productivity in the old East Germany being lower than in the old West Germany. And in the work from home debates, people often say they are more productive from home - or from the office.

How is productivity measured? It's fairly obvious if you work in a factory by how many widgets you make (assuming they work) but if you work in an office or a library or a shop, how do you measure it?

When I worked in Aldi it was measured by how many items you get through the till an hour or by how quickly you’d get pallets of food on the shelves (I.e bread you were allowed 20 mins, fridge was 40 mins)

now I work in an office and each ‘scheme’ on has an allocated number of hours. It’s done by month so add up how many of those ‘hours’ you’ve done and how divided by the hours you’ve worked over the month to give you the productivity.

lots of different measures to work on throughout different industries