In one paragraph, explain why productivity is an important operations management issue. Read article below:

A United Airlines jets wingtip clipped another jet earlier this summer after inexperienced ramp workers misjudged the distance between the aircraft. Some nurses are starting hospital jobs after graduating from school having never touched a live patient. Chipotle said sales at its restaurants are lower than they would be with more experienced staff.

On paper, many companies workforces are close to prepandemic strength or have even surpassed their early-2020 head count. In practice, companies are thrusting many workers into roles they arent entirely ready for to satisfy demand for goods and services ranging from burritos to travel and healthcare.

Companies have been laser-focused on filling job vacancies for most of the past year. They have raised wages, lowered barriers such as experience requirements and retooled hiring to make on-the-spot offers in an effort to reduce shortages that kept them from filling orders and keeping customers happy.

Those efforts have helped the U.S. economy recoup the 22 million jobs lost early in the pandemic, reducing the unemployment rate to a half-century low of 3.5% in July. The Labor Department will report August employment data on Friday, and economists expect U.S. employers added another 318,000 jobs last month. That figure would represent a slowdown from the strong pace of job growth this year, but it would demonstrate that employers are still adding a historically high number of new hires.

But unseasoned employees and the need for companies to allocate more veteran workers time to training new hires have contributed to lower labor productivity in recent quarters, executives and economists say. Weve lost a whole generation of institutional knowledge in the pandemic, said Brynwood Partners Chief Executive Henk Hartong, whose private-equity firm owns Hometown Food Co. He has increased training in his factories, which make Pillsbury cake mixes and other foods.

A worker at a Hometown Food factory in Toledo, Ohio, in 2021. Photo: Sylvia Jarrus for The Wall Street Journal

Companies are in the uncertain position of investing billions of dollars in hiring and training while the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates to reduce inflation. Many of the employees brought on in the hiring blitz of the past two years will be hitting their stride as demand for goods and services potentially slows.

We havent had a case before where theres a global disruption to economic activity, but we boost demand to prevent a depression, and now were trying to put the pieces back together, said Brad Hershbein, senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. We dont have a precedent in the modern economy for how this works.

Executives in some industries say hiring has exceeded training capacity. An increase in retirements during the pandemic and a rise in worker absences due to Covid-19 cases and summer vacations havent helped. Executives also say new employees quit at higher rates than tenured workers, adding to turnover and demand for training. And many Americans are switching industries and careers, so more people are acclimating to new roles.