Productivity Gains at Whirlpool 1. Who has benefited from the productivity gains?

Everybody has benefited the productivity gains in whirlpool. The workers and the management, the company and the stockholders as well as the customers.

2. How are productivity and quality related? Higher quality goods take more time and labour and higher quality raw materials to produce, so a drive to greater productivity almost always means a diminution of quality. An exception is in cases where standardization and precision mean a significant increase of quality, as in machine parts, which can be made more standard and more precise by machine, which is also more efficient. 3. How can a company afford to pay its workers to productivity gains?

Employee pay has seen recent increases due to a majority of factors such as the fact that companies have started relying on post sales for profit increases because they have found that the after sales effort is important for customer relations and thus, these firms need better quality, satisfied workforce to be able to have a high quality after sales service. Also companies have realize that the support function is important for growing sales level thus , it is getting a lot an important factor that should be kept in mind while deciding on a compensation policy is that the bonuses for managers who are in high-level positions , work at corporate headquarters , and have low seniority are more sensitive to performance than are the bonuses given to managers without those three characteristics . They also have found out that such managers for whom the compensation is sensitive to performance tend to have higher productivity and better performance than the others. The more the quality improved the company agreed to gain sharing the workers by increasing their pay for productivity