Measuring and Improving Employee Productivity

Do you want to know how your company’s productivity is? Would you like to know how to improve it? The first step is to measure employee productivity. Please read this guide for tips on increasing productivity levels. That will include key metrics and strategies to help your business reach its maximum potential.

The average employee spends 25% of their time on unproductive tasks: administrative work, social media surfing, and email management. Eliminating those distractions equates to an instant 20% boost in workplace productivity. But how do you ensure your employees are as productive as possible?

This blog post briefly introduces the key metrics and strategies for measuring and improving your employee’s productivity within your company.

Introduction: 

Traditional methods for employee motivation measurement include the output of survey questions and unit conversions. Both of these measures can be used only on a small scale and are unsuitable for measuring large-scale productivity improvements of employees. A traditional, quantitative approach may need to provide more insight into a company’s productivity or growth strategy.

In addition, such quantitative measures are highly dependent on a company’s specific workforce composition, data collection methodologies, and data quality issues. As a result, these traditional measures can be challenging to interpret and often yield inconsistent results.

In contrast, a more holistic approach to measuring employee productivity calls for looking at more than just a single metric: a company’s overall performance, employee engagement, business results, organizational culture, and vision. This approach provides greater insight into the various aspects of a company’s performance and allows management to make more intelligent decisions about implementing growth strategies.

Inclusive Workplace Culture: Benefits and Best Practices

The average number of hours worked per employee per week is one metric the program can use to track employee productivity. Return on investment is another critical metric used by successful businesses to measure the productivity of their employees. A good company will spend time on initiatives or activities with a high return on investment and less time on initiatives or activities with a low return on investment. You can increase your employees’ productivity by increasing their training and development spending; however, ensuring that such increased spending does not negatively affect the company’s bottom line is vital.

Then consider whether your employees are as productive as possible within these ten key measures.

Collaboration tools: 

The most commonly used collaboration tools at companies are instant messaging, Mobile Apps for Work, and team email, with 88% of respondents saying they use these programs daily. Other frequently used collaboration tools include file-sharing (81%) and office-sharing software (71%). While many aspects of employee productivity are difficult to measure, the results showed that respondents who use collaboration tools daily are more likely to complete tasks on time and more likely to complete tasks in less than three steps.

Ability to Provide Quick Customer Service

Companies need employees to provide quick customer service with minimum effort to remain competitive in today’s marketplace. A quick response rate is measured by the number of tickets raised by the customers and resolved by the customer support teams.

Ability to Adapt Quickly to Changes In Business Environment

Changes are inevitable in today’s business world, and those companies that can keep up with these changes tend to be more successful than those that cannot. The EPICS survey results showed that most productive employees are more likely to adapt quickly to changes in the business environment.

Companies can measure their employees’ ability to adapt quickly by using this survey and understanding the impact of collaboration tools on adaptation. For example, it is prudent for companies to know if their employees respond faster when communicating via collaboration tools or email.

Value of Time Spent on Tasks

One of the most essential metrics for employee productivity is determining the value of time spent on tasks. It indicates how successful an employee is at completing a task within a specified time or number of steps.

Work-Life Balance

Burnout can severely hamper productivity. Encouraging a healthy work-life balance ensures that employees remain refreshed and motivated to perform their best. The survey results showed that employees with high levels of work-life balance tend to be more productive. Innovative organizations will use this data to adjust working schedules. They can also implement programs that help employees achieve a healthy work-life balance.

Commitment to the Organization’s Vision, Mission, and Values

Trust often means different things to different people. Hence, it is important to question what value it adds to the company. With trust, people feel comfortable sharing information and ideas, creating an environment where productivity can flourish. The survey results showed that organizations with high levels of trust between management and employees experienced higher productivity levels.

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is a measure of employee satisfaction and loyalty. Productivity and effectiveness are the most important metrics to track and measure internally. Not only does it impact employee morale, attitudes, and future productivity, but also the bottom line. Productivity can be measured with simple vital metrics such as the average number of hours an employee works. The total number of work hours per day, the percentage associated with productive work time. However, instead of simply tracking these metrics, looking deeper into why your employees might need to be more productive than they are is vital.

Number of Growth Projects / Applications 

Growth initiatives are the most important thing your company can focus on if it wants to grow. Growth initiatives aim to increase sales, reduce costs, and focus on building a solid business that customers like. These initiatives can also contribute to improvements in employee productivity.

Measuring workforce management is critical to ensuring profitability and quality work output. It would help if you had a clear idea of how workers can be more efficient. A good measure of your employees’ productivity levels should be built on a strategy focusing on goals, strengths, and weaknesses.

Conclusion

Measuring and improving employee productivity is a crucial task for the managerial team.  As this is not a regular executing process, the assessment process should be a standard template.

Once the results can be noted, the improvement areas have to be identified, and then the focus should be projected on providing training programs to the employees and upskilling them as per the company’s required standards.