Three questions before you chart output per person
Hours definitions, mix of work, and who was actually present usually matter more than the line on the chart.
Output-per-person charts travel well in a board pack. They also collapse three different ideas into one line: what was produced, who was paid, and who was actually present.
First: what counts as an hour? Paid breaks, handover, on-call at home, and training days are treated differently from one employer to the next, and often differently from one supervisor to the next. Irakli’s second read on our studies is mostly this question.
Second: was the mix of work stable? A packing line that ran gift sets in December is not the same work as January bulk. A clinic that added a new procedure will look “slower” per person even if nobody idled.
Third: who is in the denominator? People on long sick leave, unpaid leave, or borrowed from another site will swing the chart without a change in effort. Until those three answers are written down, we will not draw a trend line that looks more certain than the files.