The efficiency trap: dishwashers and business metrics

Summary: One type of efficiency often leads to inefficiency in other areas. It’s important to maintain a balanced perspective on different types of efficiency and to relate them to your overall goals.

Dishwashers frequently have an efficiency label on them. Those labels irritate me because they imply there’s only one kind of efficiency that matters – energy efficiency. Sometimes they add water efficiency. Both energy and water efficiency are important, but I can easily come up with other ways to measure the efficiency of a dishwasher.

Also, when I think of an obsession with energy efficiency I get this image of Scrooge and Bob Cratchet. Scrooge was so worried about how much coal he was burning that he made his loyal employee miserable.

Anyway, here are some other ways to measure the efficiency of a dishwasher.

How much soap you need
How long the cycle takes
How long it takes to fill it
How long it takes to empty it
How many dishes it can wash at a time
How many different sizes and shapes of dishes it can wash
How noisy it is
How much space it takes up in your kitchen
How often you have to clean out that filter thing in the bottom

I’m sure I’m missing a few. For example, I’m not sure how you’d measure this, but how about something like “how well this dishwasher keeps dishes from piling up in the sink”? Personally, I care about that more than I care about the dishwasher’s energy use.

In addition to this somewhat narrow focus on one kind of efficiency, some people suffer under what I call “the tyranny of the full dishwasher” – that’s that feeling that you can’t run the dishwasher until it’s completely full.

That’s not true. There are other considerations in life, like managing your daily schedule.

You may be wondering what this has to do with business, because this podcast isn’t about home economics.

I think there’s a good parallel to business here. How are you measuring efficiency in your organization, and are you allowing one form of efficiency to interfere with another?

A lot of things have to do with what you’re measuring.

Let’s say you measure your business by revenue per employee. That’s a good metric, but it can lead to inefficiencies in other areas. You might neglect necessary training. You might accumulate a lot of tech debt because you don’t have enough tech staff to keep things up to date. Customer service may suffer. You also might create a turnover problem by overworking your staff.

Alright, so let’s look at revenue per customer, which is another good metric. That can result in some of the problems I just mentioned, and it can also lead to cutting corners and creating a poor quality product.

The point of today’s kitchen conversation is that any metric you use will probably cause distortions and inefficiencies in some other areas of your business. Be sure to look at things from multiple different angles, and don’t get too laser-focused on one metric. Make sure “efficiency” isn’t getting in the way of something more important.

P.S. — The AI-generated image above cracks me up. You can’t put a dishwasher in front of a sink like that. It’s amusing the sorts of things AI gets wrong.