How to Effectively Measure Productivity in the Workplace
The success of your business depends on the productivity of your workforce. If staff are underperforming they’re hampering your company’s growth and their own.
Given that productivity is often the determining factor in whether company’s succeed or fail, it’s no wonder that employers are constantly looking for ways to accurately measure productivity and use those findings to enhance performance while keeping employees happy and healthy.
This race has turned productivity into something of a science, and businesses who get that delicate alchemy right are invariably the ones at the forefront of their industry.
Productivity vs efficiency
One of the key mistakes businesses make when measuring productivity is confusing it for efficiency.
Simply put, productivity is how much work is produced by your business, and efficiency is how many resources were used to complete that work. In other words, the more work your team completes, the more productive your business, and the fewer resources that were used to complete work, the more efficient your business.
Leading companies are those that know how to increase productivity without sacrificing efficiency. The two co-exist in teams that learn how to do more with less and those that effectively calculate and analyze their productivity to address performance gaps.
Calculating productivity
Total Output (or Sales)/Total Input (Hours) = Productivity
While there’s no one-size-fits-all rule when it comes to productivity, the above equation is a useful starting point.
“Total Output/Sales” is the amount your business has generated in a given period, and “Total Input/Hours” is the amount of hours it took to reach that figure. This gives you an idea of how much your business generates per hour of work.
If you want to hone in on specific employees, teams, or departments, you can calculate productivity by looking at total output/number of employees to determine how much each employee or team is contributing.
Of course, these rules are only a baseline. They don’t take into account factors such as brainstorming, creative work, research, available business tools, and workplace culture and environment - all of which have to be considered when building an accurate picture of your entire operation.
The situation gets even more complicated in modern-day workplaces where employees are often working remotely, or on a hybrid schedule. How can you accurately assess these workers' performance when they’re not consistently in the office? And if you can’t measure their productivity, how can you spot when it’s dipping or identify roadblocks?
EPM - A better way to measure productivity
Employee Productivity Monitoring solution Prodosore, offers instant visibility into the productivity of your employees using a simple score and actionable analytics- no matter where they work. The score is generated using machine learning and AI to measure the activity of your employees in CRM solutions, office software, communications tools, and other workplace staples.
These invaluable business insights can be used to predict and improve revenue results, increase employee retention and the adoption of cloud tools and software, identify employees who may require additional support, enhance coaching, and find previously unseen opportunities for improvement.
This is a more human approach to measuring productivity, helping managers focus on what matters most - daily deliverables, not busy work. With Prodoscore, you can track trends, spot red flags, and monitor remote teams, all from within a single interface. Using the Prodoscore dashboard is easy, convenient, and streamlines analytics so managers can enhance their own productivity as well as that of their workforce. With these insights at their fingertips, leaders can then create data-driven processes designed with productivity in mind. In this way, the productivity benefits filter through your entire organization, becoming embedded into your operations and safeguarding future growth.
