Had the pleasure of taping my podcast - The CYA Report (check it out if you haven't yet) - over at Fistful of Talent yesterday with the great Steve Boese and the talented Trish McFarlane.  The podcast will be out next week, and we're talking about the Allied HRIQ Mobility survey, which starts with a bunch of great stats on relocation, then quickly gets into some related areas, including recruiting effectiveness and onboarding research.

In the podcast, Trish made the observation that one of the things that interested her most about the Allied research was the fact that most of the research respondents felt like she did about getting new employees to full productivity - that it takes a long time.

Which made me think this - everybody is freaking guessing about what "Time to Productivity" is at their company.   No one has a clue what it is - seriously.

When you see a "this is our time to productivity" stat at a company - especially an overall number that isn't single position specific - just go ahead and assume it's a wild#$$ guess.  Why?  Because truly having a number for "time to productivity" takes an amazing amount of discipline, and I'm guessing your company doesn't have time to really get into it. 

Think about it - you've got to do the following:

1.  Determine what the most important things are you need out of a role and communicate to the newbie.

2.  You've got to set a CLEAR level of performance in each of those areas that illustrates "meets expectations", aka "full productivity".

3,  You've got to evaluate where the person is at constantly until (DING!!) they reach a level of full productivity for the role you have them in.

4.  You need to record that number consistently across all employees and give an average.

Time to productivity is a great buzzword.  Pros like Trish, you and me know it when we see it.  But a hard number for the field to bandy about like a customer service stat?  HR pro, please.  #nosale

And before you blast me with emails, I get you might have a good number for some easy to measure positions, like production floor associates, even a recruiter.  But the rest of us in the murky gray?  You slay me with your "overall metric" for productivity at your company.  

You know it when you see it - like style or porn.  But you can't put a stat to it.  If everyone can't turn in a performance review, how can you know time to freaking productivity?

But all is not lost - I'm throwing "working in a coal mine" by Devo in to raise your spirits on the productivity front...