Labor intensive can mean physically demanding work or refer to the amount of capital or time spent on a project’s workforce. The latter two meanings are specific to business and can be quantified, while the former is subjective. The amount of work versus time or money spent determines if a process is labor-intensive.
Labor intensive has a variety of meanings. The most basic meaning is that a specific job is hard, usually physical. The other two common meanings are found in business situations. The first is that the amount of capitol placed on the workforce exceeds the amount of capitol placed on any other area. The other common meaning is that the amount of time spent performing an action exceeds the amount of time preparing or dealing with the results of that action.
The basic meaning of labor intensive, that a job is mostly physical labor, is common outside the business world. This meaning, while very common, is also highly subjective. One person will see a job as too physical, while another will not. As a result, the term has a broad meaning that is difficult to quantify.
The other meanings of labor intensive have a much more specific meaning for business. These meanings focus on defining the amount of work employed versus the amount of time or money. In both cases, these labor-intensive uses contain quantifiable variables.
This first common meaning has to do with money versus work. In this case, a labor-intensive process is whenever the money spent on work equals more than half of the money spent on the project or more than the money spent on any other area of the project. Essentially, intensive in this sense is related to the money spent and not the difficulty of the work.
The other common meaning concerns time. In this labor-intensive meaning, the amount of time a job takes is greater than the amount of time it takes to set it up or process the results of the job. This case refers more to individual tasks than other meanings. While it is difficult to quantify an entire job using this meaning, individual tasks are very easy.
As an example, consider an office worker researching new products. While it’s almost impossible to quantify your work as a whole, individual tasks are simpler. If the task being evaluated is presenting a product in a meeting, he may need to prepare a presentation, find updated specifications for the product, and make copies for others in the meeting. After the presentation, he may need to answer several questions.
The example results would be easy in real life. The man can spend several hours preparing for the meeting and a few minutes later answering questions. The presentation itself can take as little as 15 minutes. In this case, preparing and dealing with the results of the task took much longer than running the task. So, when viewed from that perspective, presenting your product didn’t require a lot of work, although preparation for the presentation was more likely.
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