What is Employee Productivity?
Employees’ productivity is the amount of work done by an employee in a particular period. High employee productivity is crucial to the success of an organization.
Measuring Employee Productivity helps an organization make informed decisions to align the workforce’s performance to that of the short-term and long-term goals. It also helps compensate the employees correctly, ensures the optimum utilization of the human resources, and augments business growth.
How To Measure Employees’ Productivity?
There are various ways to measure and increase employee productivity. Let’s discuss some of the best ways to do it.
1) Analyze Quality Of Work
Quality of work is considered the benchmark in measuring employee productivity. The deliverables’ overall quality and completing it in the required time without missing deadlines are one of the most critical criteria organizations adopt while measuring the employees’ efficiency.
The value generated with the output decides the competence of the employees. Employers can gauge it with a regular review of the client deliverables. They can use the clients’ feedback and the cost incurred in completing the task to measure employees’ productivity. Employers can ask their client to give feedback on their work and what they liked the most in their outputs.
Depending on the client’s response, you can check which employee worked that particular thing. Keeping such kind of feedback in a spreadsheet and then analyzing monthly performance of the employees at the end of the month is probably the best way to measure employees’ productivity.
2) Individual / Team Assessment
It is an easy and straightforward method to track employees’ productivity. Business activities assigned at every level should be completed within the stipulated time.
A company can measure the number of assignments completed within the given time frame against the tasks assigned.
Measurable goals and step-by-step identification of the project’s status help a company calculate the employees’ efficacy. With various Project Management software available such as LiquidPlanner to manage projects, tasks, employees and their time. An organization can get a comprehensive view of all the team members’ performance and evaluate them on the pre-decided objectives of the project and its expected performance.
3) Modern Tools
Routine and repetitive manual tasks affect the efficiency of the employees. A lot of their precious time is spent on completing non-productive tasks, which is a significant hurdle in achieving operational efficiency. With modern automation tools, manual tasks can be automated, which can take employee productivity to extraordinary levels.
Manufacturing, Warehousing, Banking, Insurance, Retail, and IT and Many more industries benefit from automation: For example, Contact centers are increasingly using software to improve employee productivity. With quick access to data, the agents can achieve first-call resolution and enhance the customer experience.
Similarly, small businesses are looking forward to getting a cost-efficient solution that can increase employee productivity and yield better results in terms of more revenue. One such solution is a small business phone system that can optimize your success in sales and support collaboration. It also helps manage call activities, add notes, and assign calls to the right team.
With Covid-19 pandemic, organizations have been forced to transform their style of business, so solutions that can help them improve workforce productivity (especially of the remote workforce) are in huge demand.
4) Periodic Training
One of the best methods to improve and measure employees’ productivity is to conduct periodic training sessions.
Training broadens employees’ skill set, making them aware of the new technologies & helps them improve their work methodologies. Such training therefore can be helpful to achieve better outputs faster, and helps them improve communication skills and foster team spirit. Benefiting not only the team but the whole organization.
It is noteworthy that training/mentoring is crucial for both new entrants and experienced professionals. It helps the latter work towards innovation and improves their morale to work to the best of their capability.
Training sessions help employees identify their weaknesses, work on them, and explore and develop strengths to achieve greater work output. Attending workshops and corporate events also helps as they gain new insights into their core expertise area.
5) Conduct Employee Surveys
If an organization feels the employees’ performance is deteriorating or not improving as expected, then there might be some issues that the employers are unaware of. Employees should be given the flexibility to voice their opinion discreetly via surveys.
The results obtained can draw your attention to the critical issues that might prevent the employee from performing better. Surveys allow business organizations to improve employee efficiency, measure and compare it with previous records, and improve it to yield the desired output. The HR department can conduct surveys and get unbiased and honest feedback digitally with survey software.
6) 360-degree Feedback
360-degree feedback is a highly interactive way to measure productivity. It is a highly successful strategy, especially in small and mid-size organizations where people are familiar with each other. Co-workers are the best people to gauge the effectiveness, communication skills, and attitude towards work.
Organizations can get a bird’s eye view of the overall employee productivity by getting comprehensive feedback. However, it is noteworthy that before implementing this method of measuring productivity, they need to be trained to evaluate their co-workers’ abilities.
The training encompasses putting aside the personal equation they share with the co-worker and focussing more on the professional acumen. It will help employees give unbiased feedback and provide the organization clarity on the employees’ productivity level.
A questionnaire is an effective and well-organized tool to get 360-degree feedback which helps to track employees’ productivity. The results can prepare the groundwork for effectively addressing any grievances and invest in the right strategy to boost employees’ efficiency.
Here are few questions that you can mention in your questionnaire:
- Have you ever felt that you would have performed better if you had a lesser workload?
- If you had power to make a decision for the whole organization to make the results more productive, what would it be?
- As an employee, have you ever felt like if you had some kind of resources like a tool or something like that, you would have done better?
- If we ask you to rate from your team as the best and worst contributor, who would they be?
- If you ever have a chance to rate yourself what would it be?
- Would you suggest someone from your know to work with us?
7) Customer Relationship Management Tools
If your clients are happy, offering relatively more positive feedback, and there can be an increase in repeat clients.
The CRM tools are embedded with several features such as Reports & Analytics, making CRM tools for HR really useful. Organisations can know about the sales performance/productivity of the employees, e.g., the sales team’s sales performance reports generated over a period. Deals closed over a period, tasks in the pipeline, and the revenue generated by an individual employee or a particular team also help measure productivity.
A modern CRM platform that tracks the complete sales journey right from the first interaction with the client to closing a deal successfully. CRM platforms such as Salesforce; a cloud-based Customer Relationship Management Software can help in the same.
Salesforce gives an in-depth insight into the customer retention rate, customer engagement rate, customer complaints, turnaround time-these various parameters let the organization calculate the employees’ performance.
Final Word
Human resources are vital to the success of an organization. But an organization can optimally utilize all the resources only when employees work to the best of their capability. With the ways mentioned above, organizations can easily track, calculate and measure employees’ productivity.
The management needs to invest time in their employees, provide them a conducive working environment, look into their issues and quickly address their grievances. All these efforts help to build employee loyalty that plays a crucial role in the success of an organization.
By choosing appropriate methods to monitor employees’ productivity, organizations can lay down the foundation of a successful venture, ensure business continuity, promote business growth, and increase revenue in the long run.
Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay
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