If you haven’t checked your employees’ productivity yet, you could be seriously damaging your business.
Measuring employee productivity is just as important as measuring your finances. If you fail to keep track of your employees’ ability to meet goals and tasks, there’s a good chance your business can go downhill fast.
Admit it. It’s the one thing you seriously dread.
So, to make sure that doesn’t happen, check out these 7 highly-effective methods of measuring employee productivity.
1. Quantitative
If you are running a small business, this method will fit you perfectly.
In the quantitative method, you need to know your business’ normal operational output, average it and then divide it by the total number of employees in your entire business or in a certain department. Once you have this number, you can use it as a basis on weighing your employees’ productivity level.
To make it effective however, you need to be reasonable in setting your baseline. You need to consider factors that can affect your employees’ productivity, such as broken equipment, delay in the arrival of materials and other factors that are out of your employees’ control.
2. Objectives
For this method to work, you need to set clearly defined goals for your employees that will contribute to your business’ overall objectives. They need to be communicated properly to your employees so that they’ll know how valuable they are in achieving those objectives. In theory, Management By Objectives can help increase employees’ productivity by empowering them.
But, remember this: although you want your employees to feel as empowered as possible, you need to establish accountability and to ensure they stay focused. Ask your employees to meet with their superiors so they can talk about their progress and problems.
3. Time Management
In this method, employees keep track of how they use their working hours. This can greatly limit any time loss due to non-work related activities, like texting, using the Internet or chatting with co-employees. It will also help keep them on pace with your business’ goals.
There are a couple of tools you can use to assess your employees’ time management productivity. Here are some of them:
- An employee time tracking software to determine how many hours they use to accomplish their tasks
- Daily updates to beat out procrastination and to keep track of their progress
- Time and attendance management solutions that will enable your employees to clock in and out via their mobile devices, internet-connected computers or time clocks
4. Service Productivity
This is probably one of the most challenging methods since service is harder to measure than product output.
Your quality control officer or broker can’t just point to a stack of large boxes and tell you that it’s his output for the day.
As the owner, you need to know how to quantify service output and measure productivity as accurately as possible. One way you can do that is by keeping a log of how many tasks are done or how many customers are served in a given amount of time. You can also take note of how fast service delivery is or how satisfied your customers are.
5. Profit
If you don’t like gathering and analyzing data, this method will surely work for you. Instead of focusing on how your employees do their job or how they use their hours, you focus on the end result. You check your profits to see if what you’ve earned is worth the money you spend on paying your employees.
And the best part? In addition to being less time consuming on your end, this method also helps ensure that task and time tracking don’t hinder your employees’ productivity and creativity. It enables them to get tasks done more efficiently.
6. Quality of Work
Setting deadlines is great in making sure you’re all on track to meeting your goals. But, there’s one problem.
Great ideas don’t just come whenever they’re needed.
This means that asking for your team to come up with an amazing marketing campaign or submit a task with the highest-quality won’t work. In addition to hindering creativity, deadlines also create unnecessary stress that can’t prevent your employees from working their best.
So, instead of measuring their work with their ability to meet deadlines, assess their quality of work to see how productive they’ve been.
7. Customer Feedback
In B2B business, reviewing customer feedback is one of the best ways to measure employee productivity. Since there are no products or tangible outputs you can use to assess, you can consider what your clients are saying about your business to determine how well your employees are doing their job.
The same set of customer feedback you use to assess your employees can also provide you insights on how to improve your business, products and customer experience in general. This can help you boost customer retention which translates to more profits for your business.
