EXPERIENCE OF EMPLOYEE PRODUCTIVITY OF NORWAY, MALAYSIA, AND SINGAPORE by (Name)

 


EXPERIENCE OF EMPLOYEE PRODUCTIVITY OF NORWAY, MALAYSIA, AND SINGAPORE
by (Name)

Norway is one of the Scandinavian countries, which has been experiencing stable economic growth. Two out of three employees tend to experience great quantitative job demands. Most of the workers need to work in a paced environment while at the same time experiencing high job workloads. According to a survey conducted in the year 2006, Norwegian employees work an average of 34.6 hours (Ataullah, Le, & Sahota, 2014). When it comes to gender, there has been an increase in weekly working hours for women while that of men has decreased. In the past 17 years, there has been an increase in the working shifts of the employees. The degree of flexibility in the working time has been increasing in the past. 
Employee productivity has been a great determinant of organizational development in the country. Norway has been experiencing great levels of productivity. On the other hand, the level of total factor productivity has been respectable in the context of international comparison. Most of the organizations in the country have witnessed a slowdown in employee productivity; however. The employee productivity, however, in the recent past has been on the decline. The decline in the productivity is attributed to increased workload for the employees (Biggs & Swailes, 2016). This means that Norway may be suffering from a stagnating living standard. On the other hand, tackling the issue of employment growth has proved to be challenging for the Scandinavian country.
 Petroleum industry has influenced the overall productivity of the employees. Most of the resources have been shifted to oil-related activities, which compete with the high wage growth in the competing countries. The most important element in the growth of employee productivity is the knowledge level within the population. The industries in the near future will rely on knowledge-based innovation, which would help in the growth of productivity level. Besides, Norwegians have become affluent and like spending much of their time hiking or working out in the athletic clubs (Midtbøen, 2013). The generations in the past have been instrumental in building a stable economy where the current population enjoys these fruits without the need of rolling up the sleeves. There is a need for Norwegians to become good in their jobs to reverse the current trend. 
Malaysia 
As Malaysia is taking rigorous steps to become a first world country with a high income status by the year 2020, it has identified that it is crucial for it to have a high productivity. Productivity here is defined as the measure of physical output that is produced from a given quantity of inputs (Sauian, Kamarudin, & Rani, 2013). It is basically a ratio that is used to show how effectively or efficiently a given organization utilizes its inputs to produce a given product or a service (Cascio, 2016). The productivity measure used in Malaysia is the labor productivity, which it uses to gauge competitiveness in the production of goods and services. 
Labor productivity is defined as:
P = (total output)/(total labor input) 
= (total income generated)/(total labor input)

An alternative to this is the use of labor coefficients: 
j = Lj/Xj
Here Lj is described as the coefficient of labor requirement (Johnson, 2014). The data used is based on the input-output tables of Malaysia as put in the Department of Statistics. Other sources of Data for the country include the Economic Report Malaysia, The Annual National Accounts and the Economic Transformation Programme. Additional surveys are conducted in various subsectors which touch on transportation, communication and finance to help gauge whether these sectors have increased their productivity over the years. 
The labor productivity equation has been able to show that water transport as one of the factors being measured, to have an increase in the labor coefficients. When compared to air transport and operations of the ports and airports, all these have shown a decrease in labor coefficients. Generally, this shows that the labor productivity of the overall transportation sector to have increased. On the other hand, the communication sector has showed a productivity increase as does the financial sector. 
Labor productivity is essential for Malaysia as it helps it determine whether the three subsectors determined above whether there are improvements or any strides being made in terms of productivity. Malaysia has been able to re-emphasize and enhance the above subsectors for various developmental purposes. The reason why the Malaysian government pays particular attention to these subsectors is because other sectors like manufacturing are highly reliant on these subsectors. This is in terms of logistics, ICT usage and finances that are pumped. The Malaysian government has been able to implement many projects from the above named subsectors, which has formed the backbone to