"Your Garden Gloves" CASE Joseph Murray, Grand Valley State University "Your Garden Gloves" is a small gardening business located in Michigan. gin, so it is especially important to take worker The company plants and maintains flower gardens for both commercial productivity into account. and residential clients. The company was founded about five years ago, The company operates on a small profit mar- Questions and has since grown substantially, averaging about 10 new clients and one new employee a year. The company currently employs eight sea- sonal employees who are responsible for a certain number of clients. Each morning crews are assigned to jobs by the owner. Crew sizes range from two to four workers. Crew size and composition are a func- tion of the square footage of the garden and requirements of the job. The owner feels that large jobs should be assigned to crews of four workers in order to complete the job in a reasonable amount of time. From time to time, the owner noticed that some jobs, especially the largest ones, took longer than she had estimated, based on the square footage of the garden space involved. The owner's son, Joe, decided to investigate. He kept records of job times and crew sizes, and then used those records to compute labor productivity. The results were: 1. Which crew size had the highest productivity per worker? Which crew size had the lowest productivity per worker? What are some possible explanations for these results? 2. After a recent storm, a customer called in a panic, saying that she had planned a garden party for the upcoming weekend and her gar- den was in shambles. The owner decided to send a crew of four workers, even though a two-worker crew would have a higher pro- ductivity. Explain the rationale for this decision. 3. What is a possible qualitative issue that may very well influence productivity levels that the productivity ratios fail to take into account? Crew Size Average Productivity per Crew 4,234 square feet per day 5,352 square feet per day 7,860 square feet per day 3 4