Over the ages, music has held a place in the working environment. From it’s use in the earliest of times until its near extinction during the Industrial Age to the present day, music has played a vital role to employees.

A Brief History

Music is a universal language that transcends boundaries. In Victorian times, handloom weavers sang as they worked. When the loud machinery of the Industrial Age came along, music in the workplace was nearly lost. During World War II, music was once again introduced to employees via radio. Employees, often children, would lose fingers to the looms while attempting to remove something that was blocking it. Child laborers would sing to keep themselves awake.

Railroad workers and farmers sang to relieve monotony and to stay alert to dangers. With the advent of machines in the Industrial Age, singing was literally drowned out. In quieter factories, women or orchestras were hired to sing and play among the workers. Music all but died during this time. (le Roux, 2005, vol. 7)

Radio was mainly used as a means to convey news, but in 1940, the British Broadcasting Corporation began running a radio program called “Music While You Work.” It ran twice per day and was geared especially for the factory workers. The bands for the show were instructed to play medleys in order to keep the workers’ attention. Also vital was for the music to keep a rhythm that would keep productivity up.

In 1942, the song “Deep in Heart of Texas” was banned due to the handclapping section that encouraged workers to momentarily stop and participate. (le Roux, 2005) Even in these earliest of times, the benefits of music in the workplace were recognized:
• Increased productivity
• Fewer accidents
• Improved alertness
• Team interaction

In response to the positive reaction, the company Muzak was founded in the 1950’s to provide music to companies. The company is still going strong today.

Modern Study of Music in the Workplace

In modern times, studies have been conducted to gauge the benefits of music in a work setting. These studies have proved much of what was already known, mainly that music improves productivity.

One study indicates that “positive affect and quality-of-work were lowest with no music, while time-on-task was longest when music was removed.” (Lesiuk, 2005, pp.173-191) On the other hand, “positive mood change and enhanced perception of design” (Lesiuk, pp.173-191) were complemented with the addition of music.

Additional studies have shown that music in the workplace promotes positive mood, sense of team, improves alertness and can lessen the event of accidents. Music “motivates workers, decreases boredom and leads to increased productivity perhaps because people work in time with the beat.” (le Roux, 2005)

Employers do need to consider the type of music played in a workplace. The mood and style should fit the business. Experts suggest all-instrumental soundtracks so that workers don’t become distracted by the lyrics. (Guess, 1999, p. 42)

Personal Headphones in the Workplace

Today, there is some movement toward personal stereos for employees. A study by researchers at the university of Illinois shows listening to music may increase the output of employees in all types of jobs. (Oldham, 1996, p. 95) The idea of personal stereos is that when a worker is allowed to listen to the type of music he or she enjoys, the better the quality of their work. While this idea is fairly recent, it does show promise.

Conclusion

Music has been the soundtrack to humanity undoubtedly since time began. It speaks to people on a primal level. Before researchers even began to study the effect of music on workers, people were weaving, working in their fields or and other jobs while humming or singing along. Now, researchers are proving what these people knew all along: music makes work go by faster and keeps spirits up.

Works Cited

As a person responsible for sales operations in a pharmaceutical company, you have an incredible amount of duties to support the sales staff. Your work can involve coordinating sales meetings, training, trade shows, CRM/SFA software, and marketing support. And, almost without exception, you are in a firefighting mode—responding to issues instead of being able to proactively improve the operations of your department.

So, when it comes to analyzing prescription data & xponent data that is available from IMS Health or Verispan, this often becomes a lower priority even though this data, combined with your own operations data, can be incredibly valuable. Or, if you are a smaller pharma company and don’t subscribe to this data, single cuts of the data that can be much less expensive can also prove to be valuable, even many months after the purchase.

There are three main points this series of articles will present.
(1) Is this data really that important? What benefits are there to analyzing this data, combined with our own internal sales operations data?

(2) Once our organization has decided that “yes”, this data is very important, how best to analyze it? What tools are out there? Should I outsource?

(3) What type of organization should I be dealing with if I choose to go the outsourcing route?

In our first article on this topic, we're going to focus on the following question:

Is the data important?

Absolutely. Medium and large pharmaceutical companies must have it because compensation is often based on how many scripts are written in a territory, and because the organization does not sell directly to its customers, this third party data is critical.

Smaller organizations, especially startups, don’t necessarily see the value of spending money for this data on a monthly basis and will try to craft compensation plans based on other criteria such as calls, sample drops, recruitment of doctors to speaker’s bureaus or events, and other methods thought to show a salesperson’s effectiveness. While this may work for the short term, the data gathered (calls, samples, recruitment) needs to be assimilated with prescription data to really know the effectiveness of various campaigns.

One example is an actual case with one of our medium sized customers. This customer ran a registry, and had doctors on their advisory board. When all of this data was merged and a query was run to see the script writing habits of doctors on the board, they found one key board member actually wrote no scripts of that company’s drugs and concentrated mostly on a competitor. Without the script data, a compensation plan based on calls, samples, and recruitments would have erroneously rewarded a rep for this particular “bad” doctor.

Medium and larger organizations usually have group management operations. With group plan track information, programs and support for these operations can become very important.

Most pharmas have some sort of relationship with insurance providers that provide for discounts at various levels of script writing. But how are these verified? With this data and tools to mine this data. And remember that these groups expend a great deal of effort to to continually get best pricing, so frequent queries must be run to make sure large groups are not changing policies and switching to competitors.

Continual monitoring of plan track data allows a company to make sure various insurance groups are meeting their obligations.

With the right tools in place you can streamline your presciption data mining and analysis efforts.