The Census Bureau constructed a score that summarizes establishments’ degree of structure in their management practices based on 16 questions. Each of the questions on management practices was scored on a scale from zero, for least structured, to one, for most structured. More structured practices are those that are more explicit, formal, frequent or specific. An establishment’s structured management score is the average of its responses to these questions.

Highlights include:

• Structured management practices differ across subsectors. For example, apparel manufacturing establishments had an average structured management score of 0.366, while primary metal manufacturing establishments had an average score of 0.642.
• Typically, establishments with more employees had higher levels of structured management adoption than smaller establishments. Except for the two lowest employment size classes with estimated structured management scores not statistically different from each other, the average structured management score increased as the employment size class increased.
• More than 80% of establishments tracked three or more key performance indicators, which include metrics on production, cost, waste, quality, inventory, energy, absenteeism and deliveries on time. Almost 32% of establishments tracked 10 or more key performance indicators. Almost 50% of U.S. manufacturing establishments set a combination of short- (less than one year) and long-term (more than one year) production targets on these metrics. For less than 2% of establishments, the main focus was on long-term production targets.
• U.S. manufacturing establishments also implemented structured management practices related to personnel. Approximately two-thirds of establishments promoted managers and nonmanagers based solely on performance and ability, while very few promoted workers based primarily on factors other than performance and ability. Just under 40% of surveyed establishments reported that they reassigned or dismissed underperforming nonmanagers within six months of identifying underperformance.

Tables with average scores are available by subsector, state, employment size, establishment age and census region. A table reporting the shares of establishments providing responses by question is also available.

The MOPS is conducted to help businesses understand current and evolving management and organizational practices and to assist in identifying determinants of establishment and productivity growth. The survey collected over 36,000 responses from the approximately 53,000 establishments surveyed in the mail portion of the 2021 Annual Survey of Manufactures.

The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence provided support for this survey.

Information on confidentiality protection, sampling error, nonsampling error, sample design and definitions can be found at <www.census.gov/programs-surveys/mops/technical-documentation/methodology.html>.

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