Measuring productivity in the workplace is more than just looking at the bottom line and annual profit figures. While the figures may look healthy, how much effort is spent getting to that stage? Is the profit truly of value if it requires excessive time and energy from multiple parties to complete?
For that reason, measuring productivity can be a way of ensuring a company is as efficient as possible. There’s more to it than just final profit numbers. Here, we look at ways to do so, as well as how to improve productivity overall.
Measuring Productivity
Just using one or two of the below tips can keep you on the right track to measuring productivity. Then you can truly understand how well your company is doing at producing their end result – be it profits or another definable goal. It will also help you motivate employees so you can release their potential, thus enhancing their performance.
1. Tasks Versus Hours
One of the quickest ways to demotivate employees is to expect them to work long hours. As a result, this will diminish your company’s productivity. A workplace culture where there is a competitive edge over who works the longest hours is never, in the long term, productive. In fact, quite the opposite. Instead, try to measure productivity and worth through task completion. Praise when tasks are completed to the highest standard. Do not praise instances where people are working 15-hour days, yet achieving very little.
2. Regular Evaluations
Staying on top of targets through regular evaluations is great for measuring productivity, and finding areas that can improve inefficiencies quickly. By opening up lines of communication with employees, you also help promote the feeling of teamwork. This is often a fantastic way to harness the true power of a team. When a team meets shorter-term, more achievable targets, they are more motivated to get on with the task at hand.
3. Effort Versus Reward
As part of your regular evalua tions, it can be a great idea to identify how much effort was put into achieving a target versus the reward of completing it. Maybe energy could be channeled elsewhere, or differently, and the same results could have been achieved. By identifying such instances, your team’s output can become far more fruitful.
4. Use Realistic Timelines
It can be tempting, especially when trying to measure productivity, to shorten timelines on projects and tasks to improve profitability. However, that can cause long-term, negative effects on employees’ abilities. The reason being, is that by shortening timelines to something totally unrealistic, employees will do one of two things.
They will either burn out by trying to achieve the target. Or, they will be unmotivated to reach the target as they realize how unrealistic it is. In both ways, it will affect your team’s long-term productivity negatively.
To make your team more productive, break down tasks into smaller, more achievable parts and set a good timeline for them. When that’s achieved, it is easier to identify areas where productivity is affected. You can then identify inefficiencies, and ways around those inefficiencies far more easily.
Workplace Productivity
Workplace productivity should be in the minds of all business owners and managers, beginning with the hiring of employees. Being as productive as possible is when profits and profit margins are improved to the best they can be. Regular evaluation of productivity is key as it means that you break down the problem into easier bite-size chunks. Ironing out any lumps or bumps that hinder productivity is therefore far quicker too. And, ultimately, it can help boost office morale. Celebrating small wins keeps people motivated and encourages them to keep going. Setting unrealistic targets is a quick way to put employees off from giving their best. This ultimately impedes productivity to far lower levels than they could have been otherwise. Read more about the cost of outsourcing.
