With automation on the rise, employers must begin to think about the efficacy of each employee’s output. It potentially becomes a key insight to understanding the metric of work employees complete and on what timetable. This is not only to purely cut costs and allot funds, but also time budget and manage projects well across teams. So here are several metrics so you know how to measure the productivity of your employees.
Control the Environment
It is common practice to believe that there are no distractions in a healthy and productive work environment. And well that is typically true, but that may not always be the case. However, when looking to figure out how your employees work best it is imperative that you find the proper consistency.
By having a consistent environment you can begin to add and eliminate factors that you can measure for finding each individual’s most productive work habits.
Set Up the Units
How do you measure the productivity of your employees? Once your environment is stable you can begin finding out the units of productivity you are aiming to measure. This is how you will measure everything and is inextricably tied to the question you want to ask. How much work is being completed?
Keep in mind that any survey will not be completed in a vacuum so there is an extra amount of incentive to make sure that whatever tasks are deemed as “measurably equal” are indeed close to being so. As well as understanding any confounding variables that may affect the work from external departments, or a catch in the pipeline that may be unavoidable and throw off your data.
Several reputable metric ideas are:
- Projects Completed
- Work Hours/Overtime Rate
- Effectiveness Ratio – Achievables, Assets & Inventory
- Turnover Rate
- Sales Growth
- Revenue Per Employee
Establish the Baseline
This is a three-part metric, How fast for the person, how fast for the company, and how fast for the industry. And while speed is the chosen metric for this article, replace “fast” with “well”, “diligence”, or “competency” and you have a similar slew of insights with which to be presented.
Similarly, when interrogators are trying to read the habits of a subject they often establish a level of baseline characteristics as they are searching for a particular deviation, more so than any specifically direct indicator.
By deciding which metrics are important you can begin to map them in the “stable” environment discussed. By understanding an individual’s baseline you then alter aspects to find out how it affects each employee.
Add in Variables
Life may do this for you. Throwing in numerous variables like having to work remotely, employees getting sick, on the days leading up to, or coming off of a major holiday, and off-work happenstances resulting in debilitating physical or mental issues. The possibilities are endless. If you have established the ways that you effectively measure what productivity you are going for – hours worked, tasks completed, inquiries given, you will easily be able to begin to cross-referencing aspects of life – good and bad to find what stimulus makes each of your individual workers most productive.
Maybe one of your workers uses the weekend to recharge and is most productive on Monday but by the time Friday returns, is something of a distraction. Perhaps a worker is incredibly effective remote and you need to rearrange some desks. Potentially a worker performs exceptionally well under the very prominent stress of the holidays. Or maybe a typically productive worker has fallen off and you should inquire about their personal life.
Most importantly as an employer or supervisor, your best undertaking is to create a stable and suitable work environment. This way, you begin A/B Testing your employees and find a way to optimize their best attributes. Everyone has a distinct way they like to work. Yet, it works even better when they find efficiency. So in this case, how do you measure the productivity of your employees? By finding their baseline you can begin to shape your company to the productivity of your most important resource.