Using a Web-Based Test to Measure the Impact of Noise on Knowledge Workers' Productivity

Abstract

An important goal of both management scientists and human factors researchers is practical, objective measurement and comparison of changes in knowledge-worker productivity that result from proposed workplace improvements. But the cost of disrupting employees to measure their performance is often prohibitive when longitudinal field studies are used. Drawing on work done in the early 1980's the research team developed and administered a brief, standardized, web-based test that measures cognitive operations typical of knowledge work instead of actual workday tasks. The test was administered to 136 experienced knowledge workers in the Boston area using an experimental design with speech privacy technology (SPS) as the independent variable. The team collected data on subjects' performance with respect to speed, accuracy, retention and several self-reporting measures. The results of this short, web-based test are consistent with earlier longitudinal studies on the impact of speech privacy technology and demonstrate that knowledge worker productivity can be accurately and precisely modeled and measured in a non-disruptive manner using web-based, surrogate tasks in a manner that is useful to decision makers.