“Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.”
As everyone knows, productivity is the measure of the efficiency of a particular system or group of systems. And when considering the corporate culture as a system, its productivity is simply the ratio of total output from the given input after completion of a given task. A company is like a long snake-canoe boat, with every worker as a paddler in the canoe race. In this snake-boat race, the effort of every paddler is very crucial and which creates a huge difference in the outcome of the race. So the company’s productivity is significantly associated with workforce (employee) productivity as they influence the company’s culture, which drives overall production. As competition has increased considerably over the years, every smart marketer has realized the importance of collective employee productivity. And with technological advancement in this modern time, every organization has started using some or other technology, such as computer monitoring software, to ensure maximum productivity from its employees.
Employee productivity is an assessment of the efficiency of an employee or group of employees, and this efficiency increases the company’s revenue. Their productivity also saves them a lot of time, which helps the employees to connect with other areas of the business. Also, it is said, Engaging the hearts, minds, and hands of talent is the most sustainable source of competitive advantage. Similarly, engaging the employees will help the company to stand out from others. Additionally, the rise in the company’s revenue will result in the company’s growth, which will bring in even more employees. And if productivity continues, this cycle of growth will steadily increase.
How do you calculate employee’s productivity?
computer monitoring software
For measuring your employee’s productivity, you should first make every employee aware of a defined set of standards for the work. You can then easily measure the productivity of every employee by comparing their work against these predefined standards. Here are some aspects on which you can set the standards:
Amount of sale- Set a standard amount of sales expected from your employees for a month, then compare their results with this standardized amount every month.
Goal completion- Similarly, determine how many goals your employee needs to reach in a month, and then compare their performance with this number.
Profit calculation- You can define the ideal annual profit expected for your company. And if you reach and exceed this expected number, your employees prove to be productive. But, if your profit falls short, the expected productivity percentage from your employees is not achieved.
Measuring the amount of work done- You can set the number of tasks your employees need to complete in a week, and at the end of every month, you can compare the amount of work they have completed with this number.
Quality evaluation- You can establish the parameters that set the quality standards for the work completed, and then you can determine how many completed projects your employees meet these criteria.
Tracking time- Set an estimated time in which your employees are required to complete all the work related to the project, and if they completed all your tasks within the set time, then they were productive with their time.
As Andrew Wilkinson said, Company’s culture is the continuous pursuit of building the best, most talented, and the happiest team we possibly can. Likewise, with these above-mentioned aspects, we aim to do the same.
To calculate an employee’s productivity based on the above aspects, you can simply use computer monitoring software that will provide easy support for setting the standard and monitoring these aspects.
Also Read – HOW TO MEASURE EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT AT YOUR WORKPLACE?
How to increase employee productivity?
Also, a customer will never love the company until the employees love it first, so it is truly said that, happy employees lead to happy customers, which leads to more profits.
Every leader in a company should aim to increase the employee’s productivity by structuring the workplace where the best capabilities of employees can come out. As employees who are getting paid to do what they love and what they are good at every day creates a motivated and more productive workplace.
To do so, here are some actionable tips to be undertaken to give a productive boost to your business:
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Learn to delegate
This is the most important tip of all, and yet the most difficult one to put into practice. As a leader, I know you wish to give a hand in everything in your company because it is like a child for you. And this certainly seems appropriate in developing a successful business, but in the long run, keeping a tab over everything on our own is impossible.
Instead of keeping a check over every other detail on the quality of work, try to distribute the work among your qualified employees with proven track records. This will save you time and open the opportunity for your employees to develop leadership experience and gain more skills. This will also improve the morale and job satisfaction among your employees.
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Task according to skills
Since it is not practical to ask your employee to be proficient in every task- instead, before assigning the task to your employee, think to yourself, is this employee well-suited to perform the given task? For this, a leader must know the skills and behavior style of his employees so that he can allocate tasks according to the skills of his employees.
For instance, an extroverted employee with very creative and out-of-the-box thinking might be the best person to pitch ideas to customers, while that may not be conducive to more rule-focused and detail-oriented work.
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Set realistic goals
Every organization needs to set a goal for working and requires to establish a methodology for performing a given task. But, this doesn’t mean that an employer can itself define the target to be completed by the employees. The goals must be set based on the capability and the ability of the employee to complete the task. To ensure productivity at work, the goals should be clearly defined and be realistic & achievable.
To set SMART GOALS for your organization, you must ask yourself whether the goals are – detailed, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. And if your goals need some tweaks, then do some alterations to ensure the efficiency among employees.
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Improve working conditions
“Our environment, the world in which we live and work, is a mirror of our attitudes and expectations”. Similarly, the environment and the working conditions of an employee highly reflects in their productivity and efficiency at work. If employees work in a comfortable workspace for a specified time, they will be able to enjoy their jobs and put maximum effort into their assigned work. So, an employer must ensure that the employee’s workspace is clean, spacious, and well equipped with the right tools. Facilities should also be provided to the employees according to their type of job. For example, a person at the sales job must be provided with traveling facilities.
If the employees work in a comfortable workspace for a specified amount of time, then they will be able to enjoy their job and put their maximum effort into their assigned task.
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To develop efficient communication
“Communication is the real work of leadership”. And for every employer, it is a must to develop a good and healthy communication channel among his employees. Good communication in your workspace will help a lot of great ideas from various minds to come into sync and fill the workspace with creativity. The employees should be motivated to work among teams to develop trust, and unity at work, also these teams should randomly be selected regularly.
Communication between employees and employers helps employees to share and speak up their problems, and accordingly, the employers can provide them with a proper solution or answer.
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Monitor their activities
To ensure maximum productivity and efficiency from the employees, it is important to keep an eye on their activities at work. All those activities that may seem like an inefficient use of time, like the use of social media, personal accounts access, inappropriate downloads, and other leisure activities, must be restricted. All these activities will cause a lack of concentration and slackness at work among the employees.
To keep a tab on everyone’s activity seems like an impossible task, but in this modern technological era, there is a simple solution to this, called monitoring software. This software monitors and supervises company administration over every employee from a central location and keep a tab over the activities and operation of its users. One of the highly productive and extensively used computer monitoring software is Empmonitor. It is a very cheap and extremely efficient monitoring software that is being used by many top MNC and start-ups.
Also Read- WHY DO WE NEED COMPUTER MONITORING SOFTWARE ?
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Exercise Positive Reinforcement
Who doesn’t love encouragement and appreciation? And it is always seen that good positive reinforcement results in better efficiency at work. Appreciating your employees for their well-done work, encourages them to be more productive at work.
This appreciation can be in the form of various rewards, such as,- PTO, promotion, taking them out for a meal, and giving bonus holidays leaves, etc. In this way, by incentivizing your employees, you can give them a psychological boost to be much more productive.
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Spend on employees
Engrave this tip in your heart that an employee comes before any client. So instead of spending on your clients, firstly focus on your employees. The best way to spend over them is by providing them with proper training. As it is said,- It is only worse than training employees and losing them, is to not train them to keep them. Likewise, forcing your employees to learn a job on the fly without any training would ultimately backfire the productivity of the company itself.
So instead of asking your workers to accomplish a task without any guidance, you must train them with proper skills for the given task. To ensure good efficiency and productivity, you can organize various training sessions, which may include- coaching, workshops, and seminars, etc.
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Provide flexible working options and time
The 20th-century practice of 9 to 5 jobs has been seeing a setback in the present time as it lays more pressure on employees and resulted in less efficient work performance. However, with the availability of strong online interconnection and mobile connectivity, the employees can work from any part of the world. Thus, by embracing the era of telecommunication, employers must provide their employees with flexible working options like working from home and flexible working hours. The bigger focus should be achieving the completion of the task rather than the timings of work.
Let’s Boost our Business productivity!
Thus, to ensure productivity among employees, all of these listed strategies are intended to put the employer in the employee’s shoes. So, every employer must incorporate these strategies for a month or two, and soon there will be a visible rise in productivity. Also you can try the computer monitoring software that I mentioned to maximize your productivity.
