The productivity of an organization is equal to the productivity of its employees. They are the key elements to build a successful business at an unbelievable speed. And that’s why employee productivity should be a part of every organization’s business strategy. Any hindrance to their productivity will leave a sore effect on your business.
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So no matter which industry you operate in, you must consider ways to boost employees’ productivity. If not, it will only lead to the wastage of human and capital resources from your end.
As per a report by Voucher Cloud, the average employee productivity rate throughout the day is just 2 hours and 53 minutes, which implies that on a shift of 8 hours. The study also depicts an employee losing a valuable time of 4 hours due to unnecessary intrusions and delays.
All these are the main reasons that result in the overall performance gap of an employee.
So how to measure and track employee productivity in the organization to fill these performance gaps?
Best Measures to Track Employee Productivity in an Organization
Below are a few proven solutions that organizations come across with the help of technology and business intelligence to track employees’ productivity.
1. Set A Baseline With Clear Expectations
An employee must follow a set baseline with clear expectations that ensure what they can or cannot do. They must know that they are supposed to meet certain specific standards for their tasks.
By mentioning clear expectations, you can set a borderline for all your employees that they must follow. Also, with set deadlines, there will be less time for procrastination among your employees, and they will be able to deliver their work timely. Your employee must understand that they need to adhere to the given job responsibilities.
2. Set Clear Goals And Objectives
Defined goals and objectives help employees boost their productivity and reach their set targets quickly. With a target in mind, they can channelize all their energy into achieving them. They will lead to no distractions or disturbances, or any sort of confusion.
A clear goal will encourage them to:
- Know their role
- Expectations related to the goal
- Timely delivery of tasks
Informing your employees beforehand about a task gives them a clear outline that won’t waste their time and encourage them to start immediately to finish it up in due time. Keep examining the employee performance towards their goals and how much they contribute towards it regularly.
This can be done by:
- Weekly or biweekly feedback or one on one discussion sessions
- Quarterly reviews
- Defined performance metrics
3. Follow Process
Productive companies have an entire process layout for recurring tasks and projects that an employee must execute. The loss or absence of these processes has a massive impact on the employee’s productivity and increases the performance gaps.
How to define processes?
- Observe your team’s current work and enlist their tasks and ask a lot of questions
- Make a flowchart and draw processes
- Highlight the problem areas
- Now work backward by starting with a goal and making the desired solution as a process.
4. Measure Tasks and Not Hours
An employee is supposed to work 8 to 9 hours a day, but that should not measure their productivity. Instead of following an industrial-age mindset, one should calculate and track employee activity as per their work efficiency and completion of tasks. Even a study shed light that managers must not fall for passive ‘face time.’
Instead:
- Evaluate what a threshold of an employee and minimum work s/he can do in a day.
- Accordingly, set it as a standard time for every task.
- Offer motivation, support, tool, and environment to maximize the productivity
- Later, when an employee completes a job, observe the productivity rate and modify the current set criteria to track their productivity.
5. Daily Updates From Project Manager
Create a feedback culture in your organization, make sure that you get daily updates on the working environment of your employees and about their productivity reports. It might be difficult for you to handle everything yourself, so interact with your project manager.
Why?
- Increases transparency
- Boosts performance
- Elevates engagement
- Helps in resolving problems
- Mitigates any risk due to miss (or no) communication
6. 360-Degree Feedbacks
360-degree feedback model ensures that you must receive feedback about an employee from everyone in the organization and customers. This tracking model is instrumental but not applicable to all business models, so make sure you are fit for it before adopting it.
How to give feedback?
- Avoid offering unrequested advice.
- Don’t be vague as it will further increase confusions
- Be empathetic and maintain secrecy
- Don’t wait for an annual performance review for offering feedback
- Offer room for two-way discussions
7. Measuring A Healthy Work Environment
Some individuals associate the work environment with lighting, ventilation, pantry, and other infrastructural facilities, but it also includes the work atmosphere in an organization.
A healthy working atmosphere will promote transparency, cooperation, teamwork, and productivity among its employees. On the other hand, an unhealthy work environment will cause depression and dread among its employees.
As an employer, you must take care that your organization must follow etiquette and provide a positive work environment to ensure productivity among your employees.
8. Use Time Tracking Software
Monitor the amount of time your employees spent on your job with time tracking software. This tool will help you measure the perfect time an employee takes to accomplish a task. Every time your employee is given a task, ask them to monitor it with time tracking software. Make sure your employees keep a record, and you can examine it to measure their productivity.
9. Keep A Check On Employees Digital Activities
Monitor the time spent by your employees by keeping a check on their digital activities. Most of the employees today spend a lot of time every day on their phones while working in an organization. These hours are enough to hamper their daily productivity and increase their performance gap.
As an employer or an HR professional, you can block the URLs of social media sites and other websites on your organizations’ system and WiFi. By doing this, you can limit the use of phones by your employee and can increase their productivity.
10. Utilize Project Management Software
Project management software is a great tool to optimize the daily handling of your business. The software helps you keep a daily tap of your employee’s work and check their efficiency throughout the day. The software also allows employees to complete their work on a set routine with total efficiency. With project management software, you don’t need to use the extra time to calculate your employee’s productivity; they will automate it for you.
Conclusion
Like an organization needs to make efforts to retain its top talent and measure and track employee productivity, it must increase its productivity in the long run. It will have a significant impact on the growth of your business.
So start working on your employee’s training to increase their productivity and make your organization stand out.
Do you think we missed any vital metrics? Let us know in the comments below.
