Hey, let’s have a conversation, as an employer, how do you measure the productivity of your employee?
You see, no matter the kind of product or service you offer, it is best to measure employees productively and measure it as accurately as possible based on job descriptions.
With the easy distractions of their personal life demands, social media virtual hangs out spaces and smartphones, it seems not so easy any more to focus consistently and remain productive.
If you do not and deliberately measure productivity, you may just be stuck with unnecessary baggage(s) clogging the wheels of progress in your organization.
With the several things that make them lose focus, if you have ensured they were very clear about set KPIs from the very start, they would be able on their own carry out their personal appraisals and access their level of performance.
I will go down work memory lane and share a few tips on how to measure the productivity of your employees.
Measurement based on quality work output:
It is always not about the volume of work churned out but about the quality of work. You must consistently create high expectations and ensure that your employees understand what exactly is expected of them at every point in time. It should be about speed and efficiency and not only about speed or only about efficiency. Speed and efficiency are symentrical halves of each other.
Clear articulation of your company’s goals and objectives: Be sure that your companies goals and objectives are clearly articulated and cascaded through the ranks. What are your short term and long term goal? It could be any of these; new business development, improved efficiencies, better customer service delivery, sales, profitability, innovation, customer retainership rr diversification? It could even be a combination of some or all of these. Whatever your goals are, be sure to communicate this properly as you/your admin are able to now set your KPIs which are derived from your short term and long term goals
360-degree feedback:
This cuts across both vertically and horizontally as everybody rates each other. It uses feedback and comments from co workers to measure productivity.
Also assessing goals vs achievements in between the year to rate productivity is key. What has been the input of the employee and how has it contributed to the company’s output?
Monthly/Quarterly reviews before annual reviews work best and produce better results as you are able to quickly re-strategize and tweak tactics as the need arises.
Management by objectives:
Should you decide to go this route, then each employee must be given a clear job description stating productivity goals to work towards whiled empowered with all the necessary requirements to meet up with the set objectives. Your appraisal must show how well his/her input(level of effort) is contributed to the overall goal and business target of the company.
A perfect scenario is presented below:
Increase in Sales target by XYZ%
- One of the goals is to increase sales by 10% in the next 6 months. Be sure to break it up into smaller goals monthly with an alignment on volumes that will be increased by month on month.
- You also need to re-ascertain if a training or refresher training won’t be needed.
- Another key thing to consider could be incentives for exceeding the sales target to keep the team motivatioed and revving to do more.
Increasing sales by a certain % or volume is quite easier to measure and this leads us to the next tip which is
Quantitative /sales productivity measurement:
This works well for a product-driven organization where the quantity of products sold over a period of time per salesman is recorded and then compared with the others within the same category.
You can do this on a simple spreadsheet or even on productivity software and this can show the number of products produced, sold over a given time period. Do not forget to take into consideration, factors not within their control like vehicle breakdown, Product lead time amongst other factors. A checklist would include
- Cost of customer acquisition also known as New business development expenses
- Total number of products sold/Sales made
- Total number of leads
- Total number of prospects converted to customers
- A number of Sales calls/Sales visit achieved within a time duration. The list can go on and on. Just be sure you develop checklists that resonate with what you do and the objective to be achieved.
You don’t want to miss reading the next article as the last set of 3 tips will be shared by 2 pm today. See you then.
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Should you need over-the-shoulder training and support on Business Strategy, Marketing, or improving the Productivity of your teams, you can reach us at info@eunicebraimah.com.