To be able to improve anything, it is crucial to first measure it. When a business aims at boosting employee productivity, they first need to have a means to track their current work performance. When you have a structured plan in place, it becomes easy to keep a track of things.
But what is the ideal way to measure an employee’s efficiency? What are the best practices to track their productivity? We have gathered advices from top industry professionals to help you with the most effective ways to do so:
- Set clear goals and expectations:
It is very important for business owners and employers to first become clear about their expectations from employees. Once you know what you want, clearly communicate these expectations to them in order to avoid any confusion.
Make sure to set specific goals that are achievable. When employers fail to define clear goals, employees are left in the dark about their roles and responsibilities which can hamper their performance.
- Track employee activity:
Keeping a track of what your employees do during their work hours helps you keep a track of their productivity and determine their efficiency. Time tracking tools allow you to see exactly what your employees are upto.
For instance, QuickBooks time tracking app lets your employees digitally log in the amount of time they invest in a certain activity. This makes billing clients also very easy based on the number of billable hours utilized by an employee.
- Adopt project management tools:
To track employee productivity on an everyday basis, project management tools are a great solution. They allow managers to see who is executing what work and what is the current status of their work.
Project management tools also allow everyone to know who is handling what part of the project so there is no room for confusion. SInce everyone knows their responsibilities, it becomes easy to measure how they are living up to them.
- Focus on quality results, not number of hours:
Pressuring employees to work a certain number of hours is never a great way to achieve highly productive outcomes. Everyone has certain high efficiency hours in which they perform their best.
Instead of focusing on the number of hours an employee has put in, focus on the quality of their results. As long as they are delivering high quality outcomes within the given time frame, it should not matter if they log out early from work.
- Take regular feedback from team managers:
Project managers work with employees closely on a daily basis. This helps them understand their capabilities, their shortcomings as well their hidden talents. Make sure to take regular feedback from them regarding how they think employees are doing.
This is a great way of tracking employee productivity as business owners themselves do not have enough time to monitor every single employee on a personal level. So feedback from their managers will become a great tracking model.
- Enhance your company’s task management:
Employees may work on a project for months at a time, but on the very basic level they are doing a lot of tasks day in day out within that project. When you ensure the system of task distribution is structured and well-organized, keeping track of task execution becomes easy.
This involves allocating tasks, employee roles, customer requirements, etc. This way you will know how the workload has been distributed, and exactly who is doing what at a given point of time.
Conclusion:
Keeping a track of employee productivity is a necessity to ensure your business grows. Especially in these highly unprecedented times, monitoring and boosting employee productivity is of paramount importance.