Introduction
A business needs both effectiveness and efficiency, not effectiveness vs. efficiency, to function optimally.
However, the problem is that a decent share of managers in corporate settings do not clearly understand the difference between effectiveness and efficiency.
They use these words interchangeably. Thus, they find it difficult to achieve the goal of making a business efficiently effective. Therefore, it becomes important to explore the topic of effectiveness vs. efficiency.
The Father of Modern Management, Peter Drucker, defining the two terms, popularly said, “Efficiency is doing things right, effectiveness is doing the right thing.”
In this post, we are going to talk about the concept of efficiency and effectiveness and understand the key differences and similarities between these two distinctive terms that have varying importance for business.
What is efficiency in business?
Business efficiency is about doing things faster. The purpose of improving efficiency for a business process is to reduce operational costs to increase profit margins. It is achieved by making sure a process takes minimal time and fewer steps and utilizes resources to the maximum potential.
What is the effectiveness in business?
Effectiveness in business is about doing things right every time. The purpose of improving effectiveness is to make sure a business is consistently producing quality products or services of high business value every time. It leads to reduced rework and higher customer satisfaction, resulting in increased profit margins. It is achieved by improving existing business processes for quality.
Efficiency vs effectiveness: key differences
The key difference between efficiency and effectiveness is that efficiency refers to doing tasks in the most economical way possible, minimizing resources, time, and effort while maximizing output. Effectiveness is about achieving the desired goal, regardless of the resources.
In simple words, efficiency is about “how” something is done, while effectiveness is about “what” is achieved.
Here is a side-by-side comparison of the efficiency and effectiveness.
| Feature | Efficiency | Effectiveness |
| Focus | Completing tasks with minimal waste of resources (time, effort, materials) | Achieving the right goals, delivering the desired results |
| Goal | “Doing things right” – Optimizing processes to get the most out of resources | “Doing the right things” – Selecting the best course of action to achieve the intended outcome |
| Measurement | Input-to-output ratio (often quantitative and focusing on speed, and cost reduction) | Input-to-output ratio (often quantitative and focusing on speed, and cost reduction) |
| Perspective | Short-term, process-oriented – Concentrates on streamlining individual tasks | Long-term, outcome-oriented – Considers the bigger picture and the ultimate impact |
| Importance in business | Efficiency helps reduce costs and improve productivity, but without effectiveness, it can lead to wasted effort on the wrong tasks. | Effectiveness ensures efforts are directed towards achieving the right goals, leading to success in the long run. |
| Relationship | Ideally, strive for both. Balancing efficiency and effectiveness allows for optimal use of resources while achieving desired outcomes. | Striking the right balance involves clear goal definition, process improvement, and ongoing evaluation. |
Let’s take an example of a content marketing campaign to understand the difference between efficiency and effectiveness.
Effectiveness vs. efficiency: understand the difference with an example
Suppose two teams are working on content production for a campaign. Team A is efficiency-oriented, and Team B is effectiveness-oriented.
Team A
Team A has five writers.
1 writer writes four articles in a month of the standard length of 2000 words per article.
Total output of the month: 20 articles
Average visitor per article: 1000
Total website visitors: 20,000
Conversion rate: 0.5 percent
Sign up for a product: 100
Team B
Team B has five writers.
1 writer writes 2 articles per month. This is because they spend more time on primary research and do not follow the standard length of an article.
Total output of the month: 10 articles
Average visitor per article: 2000 (due to better research)
Total website visitors: 20,000
Conversion rate: 1 percent (due to effective targeting)
Sign-up for a product: 200
Team B is more effective than Team A. But when it comes to efficiency Team A is more efficient than Team B.
It would help if you found the right balance of efficiency and effectiveness to optimize business workflows successfully.
How are efficiency and effectiveness related to each other?
Efficiency ensures you do things in record time, whereas effectiveness ensures you do the right things every time. A well-optimized business process is efficient and effective while making sure employees are not going through burnout.
With the right understanding and practices of efficiency and effectiveness, you can make sure you are not wasting resources, time, and money.
The efficiency and effectiveness of a business are closely related to each other.
Here is how:
- An efficient business process suggests a business is doing things right. It means a business is not wasting its resources, time, and money. This leads to optimized business processes with fewer steps. This saves time for resources that can be used to do high-quality work to make business operations effective.
- An effective business process suggests a business is doing the right things. It means business efforts are not wasted on the wrong things and are focused and aligned with the company’s objective. This results in saved time and effort because a business does not have to rework, eventually improving the efficiency of the team.
Thus, efficiency and effectiveness are related to each other and have a direct impact on productivity. Productivity without effectiveness is of no use, and effectiveness without productivity is not suitable for organizational goals.
Efficiency ensures that resources are working efficiently, while effectiveness ensures that resources are working on the right things. Thus, it would be best if you had both efficiency and effectiveness for optimized business processes.
Importance of effectiveness and efficiency in business
We have understood that effectiveness is achieved by improving the quality of existing business processes. In contrast, efficiency is achieved by reducing the waste of time, money, and resources in a business process.
Effectiveness is a quality metric, while efficiency is a productivity metric. Thus, to improve effectiveness, you need to take a strategic approach, while to improve efficiency, you need to focus on a statistical approach.
A business needs both effectiveness and efficiency.
If a team is highly efficient but lacks effectiveness, it might be creating products that are not so great or of high business value. A highly efficient business with low effectiveness may end up creating products at a rapid pace of low business value, resulting in business losses.
Similarly, if a team is effective but not efficient, it might not be able to create products at the desired speed. A highly effective business with low efficiency may end up producing quality that runs out of the budget and market-expected timeline, resulting in business losses.
Therefore, a business needs to strike the right balance between efficiency and effectiveness.
The role of effectiveness is to create a product that serves business objectives and provides high value. The role of efficiency is to create a product with minimal waste of resources.
Tips for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of teams
Every business wants its workforce to function at high efficiency and processes to be efficient and effective. The goal is they don’t want to waste resources and time.
For that, a business needs to become both efficient and effective to be successful, and it should not happen accidentally. You have to make efforts and invest time and money in making business processes efficient and effective.
1. Strategic management
An effective business process means it is producing the desired outcomes. For any team to work effectively, it is very important to clearly define the objectives and provide a roadmap to the team to achieve those desired objectives.
Clearly define the organization’s goals and objectives and project deliverables during strategic planning and create a roadmap to ensure your team’s efforts are in the right direction and aligned with strategic initiatives and desired outcomes.
2. Define the metrics
Once you have defined the goals and created a roadmap to ensure effectiveness, you need to define how you are going to measure the team’s performance to evaluate the process efficiency. The higher efficiency also indicates the effectiveness of your business plan.
Identify the business metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) you are going to measure. Keep in mind every industry has its own set of business metrics and KPIs. You need to identify the relatable business metrics so that the result of data points leads you up to the set goals.
The right KPIs with analytics help you understand the impact of the work your team is doing and identify areas for improvement so that resources are used effectively.
3. Utilize technology to implement effectiveness and efficiency
You have decided what you need to do and what you need to track, but to implement it on the ground, you need the help of technology. Leverage project management software to create workflows and streamline business operations. Set the goals, measure the business metrics, and add KPIs and milestones to track and evaluate the efficiency of business operations.
Using technology not only helps you but also helps team members understand their responsibilities and visualize how it impacts the business process, goals, and cross-functional projects.
ProofHub is a powerful project management software that helps you create a custom workflow to streamline your business operations. You can add custom fields to a project you want to track to measure progress with the project reports using business metrics and KPIs.
4. Use industry-standard techniques for process improvement
There are various business process improvement tools and techniques that can be used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of a business process. The most popular techniques include Lean Six Sigma, Kaizen, Agile, Flowcharts, Diagrams, Charts, Root Cause Analysis, and Value Stream mapping. You can learn more about each technique from the best online project management resources.
These key strategies can help you improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your business operations. Have a look at the additional tips to improve business efficiency and effectiveness.
5. Free flow of information between team members
When working in a cross-functional team, sharing information about the tasks and coordinating work helps each other gain a better understanding of the requirements. This helps you work on the right things without wasting effort resulting in improved effectiveness of the team.
6. Automate repetitive tasks
94% of companies perform repetitive and time-consuming tasks.
Automating repetitive tasks using workflow automation software can improve efficiency and productivity. It saves you the time on creation and delegation of tasks. This saves time that can be utilized on other responsibilities.
7. Do not switch between tasks
Switching from one task to another kills productivity. Try to focus on one task at a time. If not possible, try task batching. It involves grouping similar tasks. This helps you save time and improve efficiency.
Another method experts suggest to be highly effective and efficient is eating the frog. It involves doing the most difficult the first thing in the morning. It helps you focus your maximum energy on the most important task. To effectively apply this method, you need to learn about prioritizing tasks so that you can find the most important and difficult task.
8. Keep burnout in mind while planning workload
Effectiveness and efficiency have a direct relation to burnout. If a resource is overburdened and not getting enough rest, it can lead to reduced efficiency and effectiveness.
Plan the resource workload keeping the burnout in mind using a work management platform. Make sure they have sufficient time to take breaks throughout the workday so that they can regain concentration and improve efficiency.
9. Identify areas of improvement
Regularly review your business processes for the benefits and pitfalls. The best way to do so is to gather feedback from the people who are a direct part of the process. Talk to the people to find out the areas of improvement. This will help you find out the key problems and solve them to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of a team.
How to calculate the efficiency and effectiveness of a business?
You can measure the efficiency and effectiveness of the manufacturing business process with straightforward formulas.
For example, you can calculate efficiency as a ratio of output to the input multiplied by time.
Efficiency = Output / (Input * Time)
Similarly, you can calculate effectiveness as a ratio of achieved output to the desired outcome.
Effectiveness = Achieved Output / Desired Outcome
But in IT projects like Agile software development or projects with intangible elements, you cannot directly apply these formulas. Also, every industry has its own business metrics and KPIs to measure efficiency and effectiveness. Thus, you need to follow the below-mentioned steps to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of a business process:
- Step 1: Identify the process metrics. Examples include cycle time, error rate, throughput, and net promoter score.
- Step 2: Set the process benchmark. It can be internal or external, depending on whether you compare your process to another process within your organization or to a process outside your organization.
- Step 3: Track and measure the efficiency and effectiveness of a process. You need project management tools and software to track the different metrics involved in a business process.
Improve your business’s efficiency and effectiveness with ProofHub
ProofHub is all-in-one project management and team collaboration software. It helps you improve business efficiency and effectiveness by bringing projects, teamwork, and team communication into one place.
Here are three key ways ProofHub helps a business:
- It allows you to break any process into a series of steps to create a workflow. This ensures every step of the business process is followed for effective business operations
- You can track the progress of the work in real-time on set process metrics with detailed reports to measure the efficiency of the process
- With built-in communication and collaboration tools like chat, project discussions, and task comments, ProofHub ensures your team collaborates effectively for efficient business operations.
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- 8 Mistakes managers make & how to avoid them
- Mastering workflow management: Systems, best practices & challenges
- 43 productivity tools that will make your life much easier
FAQs
How is effectiveness and efficiency measured?
Effectiveness is a quality metric that is measured in terms of quality whereas efficiency is a productivity metric that is measured using productivity metrics related to time, money, and effort.
What are the benefits of management efficiency and effectiveness?
The benefits of managing efficiency and effectiveness reduce wasted efforts. This in turn results in reduced operational costs of a business which leads to increased profit margins.
Can efficiency and effectiveness be balanced?
Yes, efficiency and effectiveness can be balanced with the right process. Both processes are interrelated. If a process is efficient, it saves time that can be used to improve effectiveness. On the other hand, if a process is effective, it reduces the rework, resulting in increased efficiency.
Which one is better: effectiveness or efficiency?
Both effectiveness and efficiency matter to business. No one process is better than the other, but when it comes to improvement, a business needs to master the art of effectiveness first and then optimize the existing processes to become efficient. It is because without effectiveness efficiency is of no use.
Can optimizing efficiency and effectiveness lead to employee burnout?
Yes, putting too much pressure on employees to strike the balance between efficiency and effectiveness can lead to burnout. This is because when you want a team to be both efficient and effective, it adds pressure on the team to achieve goals in the minimal possible time while maintaining quality. Therefore, managers should also keep an eye on employee burnout and not push to the limit of burnout.
