People, Performance and Productivity

The measure of an organization’s success is how well its people work together. To achieve this level of peak resourcing, companies must primarily focus on their people. As one management guru put it, “productivity is a reflection of how many right people are in the right jobs in a company.” 

Conversely, if employees are placed in the wrong roles, performance suffers. This not only impacts productivity today but can have long-term consequences if dissatisfied employees leave the organization and take with them critical knowledge and valuable leadership skills.

Most business excellence frameworks agree that the secret to business success is constant engagement between the workforce and stakeholders. Regular measurement and analysis of productivity are critical for understanding whether your organization is on the road to success. 

How Do You Measure Employee Productivity?

Analyzing employee performance and productivity can seem overwhelming if you haven’t collected accurate data. A comprehensive and accurate data will allow you to understand your employees’ overall performance. A single source of truth for time worked can help you manage projects, resources, and costs more efficiently.

If productivity stems from having the right people in the right jobs, it also depends on using the right tools. Many high-performing organizations are completely automating the administrative portion of workforce management with such intelligent and intuitive solutions. These tools help them to free up managers’ time from unproductive, mundane tasks. For example, Replicon’s range of time and attendance software offers complete real-time visibility into people and projects across small, medium, or large businesses. 

The Best Ways to Measure Employee Performance

To improve the productivity of an organization, it is important to measure employee performance. Here are five strategies that can help you measure and improve your employees’ performance. 

1. Set Clear, Realistic Goals

It’s important to define measurable objectives and realistic goals for your employees. Once you’ve set clear objectives, ensure each employee is contributing to achieving your business goals and targets. Goal setting can improve focus, increase employee productivity and help in making informed decisions.

2. Build a Positive Work Culture

Work culture plays a vital role in your employees’ productivity. A negative or toxic culture demotivates employees, lowers their productivity, and contributes to high turnover. Allowing negative behavior and toxic attitudes will cultivate an unfavorable work experience. Therefore, make sure your organization has a flat hierarchy with a positive work culture.

3. Track Individual Progress

Employee progress is an important metric that helps you understand how an employee spends their time on various projects and tasks. Measuring an employee’s individual efforts allows you to single them out for recognition when they excel while helping you make data-driven resourcing decisions.

4. Create a Constructive Feedback Culture

An organization’s success depends on creating a positive work environment where everyone feels valued, welcome, and respected. Hence, it’s important to take your employees’ feedback into account to help cultivate a great work experience.

With a constructive feedback culture, you can more clearly outline your organizational objectives, improve the performance of all of your employees, and ensure that your workers feel loyal, engaged, and satisfied. Encouraging peer-to-peer feedback helps you increase team productivity since it can point out inefficiencies. This is why reviews and constructive feedback are essential in increasing team performance.

5. Use Time Tracking Software 

Using an intelligent time-tracking solution, you can track work hours, billable hours, time off, accruals, and overtime for your employees. Also, it helps you measure employee efficiency and gives clear visibility into the time spent on specific projects. Hence, by using an intelligent time-tracking solution, you can utilize time efficiently and reduce the risk of project delays.

Conclusion

Recently, former President Bill Clinton said, “I did not appreciate the power of process until after I left office.” As the Replicon range of time-tracking software solutions demonstrated, a business becomes high performing when its processes bring together quality, profitability, competitiveness and productivity.

Workforce productivity is a hot topic in the upcoming US election. Experts believe that one cause of reduced productivity is a lack of innovation. You can’t schedule innovation. But, you can give managers the right tools to manage their time so that they have more bandwidth to explore ideas they wouldn’t usually have time for.

A recent Gallup poll ranks employee engagement as the number one contributor to a company’s financial success. When employees are not actively engaged, the company often experiences significant erosion in their bottom line and in employee morale. But, by systematically improving people processes, organizations find that performance metrics go up dramatically. Engaged workers have a lower instance of absenteeism as compared to disengaged workers, who bring down the growth rate of their companies.