Abstract: Recent researches have shown that people play a key role in the operations system. Learning, workload and teamwork can significantly change people's performance. Particularly, how to assign tasks to employees is considered to be the key to improve their productivity. We propose the mechanism of how different task experiences affect employee productivity. This paper utilizes the data of a factory floor, including 12,178 task sets performed by 47 workers for empirical testing. Empirical findings show that specialization tasks are more efficient in the short-term than variety tasks, and variety tasks have advantages over specialized tasks in the long-term. Therefore, a reasonable task assignment strategy can increase employee productivity during different lengths of work cycle. On the role of employees in the operations system, our work is a useful complement to existing research work. This paper also reveals that manufacturing companies can increase productivity by making tasks very simple and highly repetitive.

Key words: tasks, diversification, specialization, workload, performance