“Manufacturing establishments in the South and Midwest utilize more structured management practices than their counterparts in the Northeast and West, according to new results from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Management and Organizational Practices Survey. Structured management practices in the South and Midwest received the highest scores of 0.568 and 0.556, respectively. The West followed with a score of 0.533, and the Northeast adopted the least structured management practices with a score of 0.517. These scores were based on the survey, which includes 16 questions, that the Census Bureau used to construct a management score that summarizes establishments’ degree of structure in their management practices. 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. The questions also identify:

• How activities are monitored.
• How targets for production and other monitored performance indicators are set.
• How achievement of those targets are incentivized.

An establishment’s overall structured management score is the average of its responses to these 16 questions. Tables with average scores are available by kind of business, state, employment size, establishment age and census region. A table reporting the shares of establishments providing responses by question is also available. The Management and Organizational Practices Survey 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 35,000 responses from the approximately 50,000 establishments surveyed in the mail portion of the 2015 Annual Survey of Manufactures.”