What is the effectiveness?

We explain what effectiveness is and what its differences are with efficiency. In addition, what is effectiveness and examples of effectiveness.

1. What is the effectiveness?

According to the Spanish Language Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, effectiveness would be the quality of something that produces the desired or expected effect , for which however the use of voice synonymous efficiency is recommended. This is also a concept linked to effectiveness, especially in the corporate and business world, in which the distinction between all these terms is often emphasized, known as the “Three E’s of Administration.”

Broadly speaking, we can define effectiveness as the degree of achievement of objectives set in advance that has an object , a procedure or even a person . Thus, something is effective when the expected result is obtained from it, without there being any considerations regarding how it was obtained or if there was a better way to obtain it.

Efficiency is a value in most professional and social fields of culture , even when it implies unorthodox methods .

2. Difference between effectiveness and efficiency

While by efficiency we understand the ability of an object, person or procedure to achieve the proposed objective , without paying attention to the means or resources used for it, whether there were better roads or the cost to achieve that objective represents, efficiency is understood as something similar but more desirable: it is the ability of that same entity or process to achieve the proposed results, but this time using the best possible means.

This means that a procedure can be effective, but expensive, brutal or cumbersome , but it doesn’t matter because in the end it always achieves its goal; while an efficient procedure will be one that always achieves its objective in a way that is also economical, suitable or convenient, depending on what area it is, of course.

3. Effectiveness

When we talk about effectiveness, especially in the administrative field, we refer precisely to the balance between effectiveness and efficiency , that is, the achievement of a result based on the capabilities implied by the specific case. Effectiveness is often understood as the union of effectiveness and efficiency, that is, as the ideal panorama of the situation, or as the closeness that we can achieve in a procedure or through the use of an object.

Thus, the relationship between these three terms according to this formula can be considered:

Efficiency + Efficiency = Effectiveness

This is equivalent to saying that the calculation of the effectiveness and effectiveness of a process makes it possible to understand, in a general panorama, the proper functioning of the process or the system in which it is inserted. Therefore, it would be impossible to be efficient without first achieving good performance in terms of effectiveness and efficiency .

4. Effectiveness examples

A simple example of efficiency (but also efficiency and effectiveness) may be the extraction of gold from a mine , suppose.

The effectiveness of the mine has to do only with the fact that there is indeed gold inside and that that gold can be extracted to the surface in some concrete way, without stopping at the type of mining or the necessary materials.

Instead, its efficiency has to do with the cost of extracting such gold , with the personnel involved, with the time it takes to remove it and other similar variables that determine how convenient the mining procedure is in that specific case, and that we it allows to evaluate if there will be other better (more efficient) methods, such as the use of explosives, robots, etc.

And its effectiveness, finally, would be evaluated annually or semiannually , according to how often the mine would make a profit, once its efficiency was evaluated and its efficiency was taken into account (as well as other possible improvement routes).