Article Approval Time Gap Management
Today our team of editors received a new tool designed to help them see how much time elapses between each article approval… The idea is to help make our editors aware as to how much time elapses between each article review and approval so that they can become conscious of activities that do and don’t produce results.
The tool will also help our management team to spot trends and problems. Example: Associate Editor Kirk this morning had 3 seconds between articles being approved when his running average is 4 minutes and 16 seconds per article reviewed. We can then zero in our quality assurance time to review that variance from the norms.
Another benefit of this tool is that some Associate Editors perform better in terms of quantity and quality of their article reviewing production…and this will help us identify and catch when people on our team are doing something right so that we can all learn from it…and thus enhance our overall efficiency… the end result being better service to our authors.
Here is an internal screen shot of Kirk’s morning approvals:
[Note: Kirk is new with us and only in his 3rd week as an Associate Editor… Normally, it takes 4-6 weeks to come up to full speed]
The idea for this tool came from the fast food industry where they time and track how many minutes and seconds it takes to bring a person from the drive thru ordering point to the pickup of the food point… with the goal to reduce the time it takes to service quality food very quickly… and in our case, to review and/or approve article submissions very quickly.
Will we be getting meaningful feedback on the results of this new efficiency program? What is the average approval time all editors? What is the average approval time all editors after one month of monitoring? What is the error rate now and a month from now? What are the main lessons learned in one month, two, etc.? This appears to be a goal setting tool with great potential and I believe if performance is enhanced as a result, all editors should receive raises and benefits equivalent to the cost of adding another editor to the payroll, or two editors if improvements eliminate the need for two more. Working against the clock can cause competition which leads to resentments which would be mitigated if it were part of a generous incentives program. I have never resented a co worker who happened to be better than me at a job or begrudged that worker fair compensation for both their ability and effort. I once worked as a beer delivery helper and back up driver. The driver made 15 cents per hour more than I did but had all the responsibility for the truck and the load for that 15 cents, which allowed me to relax over 10 and 12 hour days, worth every penny of the $1.50 I sacrificed as a helper.
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