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A case study on IM practices and employee productivity

Updated: Apr 8, 2020

Understanding the impact of good IM practices on employees day to day productivity in the public sector


When I got my first IM internship in the federal government, I was very excited! I couldn't wait to start, learn and acquire some experience in my field of study. On my first day of the job, one of my tasks was to organize short training sessions with each new employee and inform them of the current IM practices in the government and how to apply them correctly.

As you can imagine, I thought "what"? Me, a student with no experience whatsoever, with barely any idea of what I'm doing myself, is supposed to go and tell people with years of experience in the government what to do? I was very skeptical about doing it and quite frankly scared.

However, the more I did the training sessions, the more I realized that people actually cared and wanted to learn. They were eager to find out how they could improve their IM practices and contribute to the well being of their department.

This made me question why these IM policies were constantly being improved in the first place and if they worked at all in promoting productivity in the workplace.

I wondered if what I was doing was productive in any way and if it was of use to the ministry.


Information management (IM) impacts every part of an organization from decision making to of course productivity. Therefore, Information management is an important function within the Government of Canada as an organization. Hence the reason why the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) released a series of policies on the management of information, along with some directives and guidance that all government departments and agencies have implemented using various approaches.



With that being said and with my current internship experience, I wanted my research paper to study the impact of adequate IM practices on the day to day productivity of public servants in the federal government of Canada. More specifically, it attempts to understand how public servants' productivity can be influenced by the IM practices implemented in the government. I decided to use my current employer; the Ministry of Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) as a case study for this research.


Research objectives and question

This research will address the following objectives:

  • Develop a better understanding of the relationship between Information Management and productivity within an organization.

  • Test and identify the different IM practices in the federal government and how effective they are in encouraging productivity for public servants daily.

  • Provide a critical insight into the key challenges facing public servants regarding Information Management.

The research question is the following:


"How do information management policies and practices in the Canadian federal government encourage public servants' productivity ?"


We will specifically aim to take a look at:

  • Which difficulties if any, do public servants encounter in regards to information management and their productivity and how do the IM policies currently in place help conquer them?

  • What are public servants' expectations regarding the impact that IM has on their productivity?

  • How can IM policies and practices be improved to better attend to public servants' needs and encourage their productivity?


Literature Review


A stream of the research already done on this subject focused more on the relationship between IM and employees' productivity in the private sector context. They studied the impact of IM on employees' productivity in private organizations and concluded that there was a positive correlation between the two.


However, it wasn't exactly clear if the positive correlation found in these studies was directly due to IM practices because they measured the impact of other elements as well. Therefore, the causality relationship wasn't studied to the full extend.

Another stream focused more on studying what were the IM practices in some public and private organizations, what were the risks and issues and how they could be improved. This study, in particular, helped guide my methodology.


Finally, for the stream of studies who did measure directly the relationship between IM and employees' productivity in the public sector, they were done in the context of other countries and therefore weren't applicable in the Canadian context. However, these studies were relevant for their methodology; which helped develop the methodology for my research.


All in all, the review highlighted that some studies attempted to study the link between IM practices and productivity but the research on this link specifically regarding employee productivity in the Canadian public sector needs to be furthered. Hence the purpose of this research.



Methodology


The methodology used for this case study is a mixed-method one. The qualitative part of the study will consist of structured interviews with the participants as well as personal diaries while the quantitative part of the study will consist of surveys.


The sample of participants will comprise a total of 75 public servants from three departments of ESDC: Human resources, Finances and Information management. The total of participants will be divided into three groups of 25, each group representing one of the departments. The study will be divided into two phases.


The first phase of the study will be online surveys. All of the 75 participants will fill out a twenty questions online survey assessing their impression on the effect the ministry's IM practices and policies have on their daily productivity.


The second phase of the study will be structured interviews with 15 of the participants: 5 per department; chosen randomly. An interview guide will be used as a framework for the interviews comprising twenty open-ended questions divided into four sections: (1) work situation, (2) information practices, (3) challenges related to IM in their daily tasks and (4) expectations towards improving things productivity-wise.

These interviews will be followed by diaries kept by each of the 15 participants on just one regular working day. The participants will be asked to record in their journals all tasks influenced by record management practices including retrieval of information and the use of Electronic Document Repository Management systems to organize and store information. They will also have to add in their journals any comments describing the difficulties they encountered in the completion of their tasks due directly to the IM practices and policies in place in the ministry. A template will be provided to the participants to guide them and ensure the quality of the results. Follow up interviews will be done as well upon completion of their diaries to review their journal entries and ensure the precision of results.


The Timeline

I created a timeline of my methodology estimating how long it'll take to go through both phases of the study. I wanted to create a visual timeline of the study and have feedback on it. Here it is:


I hope this was of interest to you! Let me know what you think! :)

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