Retailers whose sales per employee are high are better able to withstand these cost pressures.
In 1995, for instance, real sales per employee rose 10% while non-farm productivity rose only 0.2%.
At the bottom, the telecommunications vertical still scores relatively well at 17 percent improvement in sales per employee.
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Without any layoffs, Valdiserri has nearly doubled sales per employee since 1991.
Sales per employee among privately held companiesSome economists, however, note that slowing productivity growth in the U.S. economy could put downward pressure on corporate profit margins.
Edward Yardeni, chief economist at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, points out that the growth in firms' real sales per employee used to rise in step with productivity growth.
As it ventures abroad to take on the likes of Toyota, its sales per employee are only one-fourth as high as Toyota's, figures Jardine Fleming Securities in Seoul.
Both metrics grew more slowly than they did between 2010 and 2011, when profit per employee jumped just over 20 percent and sales per employee increased by 10 percent.
Fortunately, recently, professors Nick Bloom, Toby Kretschmer, and John van Reenen (from Stanford, the University of Munich, and the London School of Economics) conducted an extensive study examining the effect of family-friendly practices on hard variables such as firm sales per employee and return on capital employed, using a large database of firms from the US, the UK, Germany, and France.
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Earlier research by Sageworks indicated that private U.S. companies continue to see the highest per-employee sales and profits in years.
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Private U.S. companies continue to see the highest per-employee sales and profits in years, according to new preliminary data from Sageworks Inc.
In addition, technology and other productivity improvements have helped boost per-employee sales and profits in recent years, which could reduce the urgency for some companies to hire.
FORBES: Private companies' current business trends still positive
Privately held U.S. companies in general achieved higher per-employee sales and profits in 2012 than in recent years, indicating they are more efficient by those measures.
These same firms doubled their sales and, as a whole, delivered more productivity than their peers as measured by revenue per employee.
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