According to a recent study, employees who work remotely are likely to be more productive than those who work from the office. With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, remote working is slowly but surely becoming the new norm. But with these new changes come new challenges; how to ensure employees remain productive when working remotely.
In this quick guide, we explore different ways you can use to measure employee productivity. We will also explain why measuring productivity is crucial for your business and how to choose the right tool for this process. Ready? Let’s get into it!
Three simple ways to measure employee productivity remotely
Set KPIs
Key performance indicators, commonly referred to as KPIs, are quantifiable values that discern how well an employee accomplishes a business objective. Measuring employee productivity for your remote employees can be a little challenging because different roles have different outputs.
When coming up with KPIs, it’s important to work closely with your employees. The idea is to ensure the KPIs are carefully crafted to suit their specific roles.
Track deliverables
A good cloud-based project management software will help keep your remote workers organized and track deliverables. With it also, you can place your remote workers in teams, assign them tasks and even track the progress of those tasks.
Tracking results based on KPIs promotes a result-oriented culture that rewards individuals based on their output. While at it, regularly reach out to your remote employees and find out areas they might need help with.
Set clear deadlines
Ensure you communicate work and project deadlines to your remote employees every time you assign them to work. When done well and with a reward system in place, most employees will easily complete their tasks within the stipulated timelines.
Benefits of measuring remote employee productivity
Helps you understand your cost-efficiency
When you measure employee productivity, you are able to understand the cost efficiency of your business. Comparing how much you pay your employees to the actual revenue of your business helps you arrive at the employees’ ROI (return on investment). You can then decide on how to reward the best-performing employees and identify areas that need improvement.
Motivates employees
When employees know their productivity is being measured, they are likely to work harder to meet or beat expectations. They know if they slack they will be singled out or even lose their jobs.
Helps to optimize team performance
To effectively measure employee productivity, it’s important that you define what kind of performance you are looking for. Communicate to your employees which dimensions of performance matter most to you and the business. This gives your business a measurable objective to pursue with optimized team performance.
Helps you understand your employees holistically
A good employee productivity measurement tool will help you understand your employees in a deeper way. By measuring their productivity, you are able to understand their emotions, interpersonal relationships, and work dynamics and what role these factors play in their overall productivity.
If you want to boost your employees’ trust and win them over, get them involved from the initial trial stages of the operations. Start by informing them of the reasons you are embracing new technology and how it works, the PROs and CONs, and how it will affect them.
How to pick the right tool to measure employee productivity
In the market for the right tool to measure employee productivity? The following are four factors to consider:
Specify the exact metrics you want to track
There are endless metrics you can use to measure your employees’ productivity. Before settling on the tool for your business, discuss the goals you want to achieve with managers and team members. Once you have clear goals, you can then decide on what to measure based on your definition of peak employee productivity.
Appoint people to be in charge of monitoring and evaluation
Designate the role of monitoring and evaluation to specific people in your business. Allow each department to have a person in charge.
Purchase the best available tool
There are dozens of tools in the market today to monitor and measure employee productivity. Different tools work differently for different businesses. Ensure you do proper research before picking the right one for your business.
Ensure your evaluation system is balanced
Fair employee evaluation should be both subjective and objective. Ensure you don’t concentrate on how fast an employee completes a task and overlook their general attitude and their willingness to learn and grow.
Are you ready for this new business tool?
Measuring employee productivity can bring immense benefits and growth for your business if done right. Consider your business type and your goals before adopting a tool to measure employee productivity. Most importantly, weigh your options and only go for a productivity tracker that fits your budget and specific business needs. Good luck!
