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The economic concept of productivity has nothing to do with anything you can measure about a single employee (or kind of employee), the article is just conflating two very different meanings of the same word.

In aggregate you measure it based on how much the company spends vs how much it makes off sold product. It's a measure of the efficiency of the company to its holders of capital.

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Oh, that's very interesting. Can you get more specific? What's the difference between productivity in this sense then, vs profit margin?

I'm abstracting a bit more than I should really, because yeah the way I put it comes off as too close to just profit.

But there are a bunch of ways to measure it, that generally comes down to some comparison of inputs vs outputs and those inputs and outputs have to be measurable in some way in aggregate.

If you Google for "economic productivity" or "labor productivity" you can find better explanations of the details than I'm likely to give.

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