How to Track and Enhance Employee Productivity Effectively

A study conducted by Voucher Cloud came up with this conclusion. As employees are the carry wheels of your organization, their productivity significantly impacts the growth and performance of your company. If most of your employees are only productive for around two to four hours a day, your company is certainly not functioning at its best potential.

In today’s highly competitive world if you have to outperform competition, it is a must for your workforce to be a productive one. The long journey of enhancing employee productivity begins with the first step of measuring the existing efficiency of your workforce.

7 ways to track and enhance employee productivity

1. Determine the percentage accomplishment rate

The percentage accomplishment rate is one of the best key performance indicators to measure employee productivity. Every day you assign some tasks to your workforce or you might assign weekly or monthly targets to them. At the end of a week or a month, you should determine the percentage of these targets accomplished which will help you determine the productivity of your workforce.

For example, if you gave a particular employee 4 tasks to complete within a day but he completed 2 out of them, then their percentage accomplishment rate will be: (2/4)*100 = 50%. This implies that the productivity of the particular employee, let us call them ‘x’, will be 50%. Although some tasks might consume more time than expected, if most of your employees exhibit 50% productivity most of the time, it’s time for you to take action to enhance employee efficiency.

2. Measure employee absenteeism rate

It’s clearly understandable that the higher the employee absenteeism rate, the lower your workforce’s productivity. When your employees are unavailable, their productivity is 0%. If your employees exhibit frequent absenteeism, imagine where the overall productivity of your company goes?

Having said that, employee absenteeism is also an indicator of the productivity of your workforce. So, you should keep an eye on the number of days your employees spend away from work on an average in a given time frame.

There is nothing complex in determining employee absenteeism rate. You just have to divide the total number of work days lost to absenteeism in a given time frame by the total number of working days in the given time frame, and multiply it by 100. For example, if an employee took 5 days off out of 60 working days, then their absenteeism rate will be (5/60)*100 = 8.33%. The permissible absenteeism rate varies from company to company. You can determine the absenteeism rate in your organization and then see if it’s acceptable.

2. Determine employee progress in relation to the training sessions conducted in the workplace

Productive employees aren’t just productive with respect to work – they are productive in everything they do. If you conduct training sessions within your company, they’ll learn to the best of their abilities and upskill. The extent of progress your employees achieve after completing a training program is also an excellent indicator of their productivity.

For example, if you offer training to your content writing team to enhance their research and writing speed, you should measure the improvement they’ve accomplished at the end of the training program or after a few days of practice. Also, you should know their previous research and writing speed to compare the new speed with. If your employees show a boost in their skills or speed in the example we have considered, it’s a sign that your workforce is highly productive.

4. Percentage error rate

Productivity is not only about doing more in less time, it’s also about doing your work with impeccable quality. Percentage error rate is a measure that can help you determine the productivity of your workforce. For example, if your manufacturing team produces 20 defective pieces per 100 pieces of a product, the percentage error rate will be (20/100)*100 = 20%. It depends upon the industry that you work in whether this error rate is acceptable or not.

Further, there are some professions where the percentage error rate is non-quantifiable. Even if you can’t determine a numerical value, you can still use this measure. For example, if you have a team of graphic designers, you can analyze how many times they make faulty designs. You can also examine how long they take to rectify their mistakes or how many times you usually have to get a design corrected. These things will give you indirect reflections of the productivity of your workforce.

5. Quality of work

Productivity isn’t limited to the amount of work done within a particular amount of time. It also includes the quality of work done. If a worker completes all his tasks quickly, but doesn’t meet the standards of quality, can we call them productive?

It’s crucial for you to consider the quality of work when measuring employee productivity. If a worker takes a little longer, but delivers impeccable quality of work, they are definitely productive. If you still need a numerical measure, cost of poor quality can help:

• Cost of poor quality: The cost of poor quality can give you a numerical value of the losses you have to incur because of poor quality. If you are losing massive amounts of money due to poor quality, it naturally indicates that you need to work on your workforce.

6. Calculate overtime percentage

Overtime percentage is another excellent indicator of employee productivity. If most of your employees have to work overtime, it clearly indicates that either they lack productivity or they are overburdened with work. To calculate the percentage overtime you don’t have to do a lot of mathematics. You just have to divide overtime hours by regular hours and multiply it by 100. If a particular employee worked for 20 extra hours and regular working hours were 100. Then, percentage overtime will be (20/100)*100 = 20%.

7. Use the productivity formula

There is a direct productivity formula that you can utilize to determine the productivity of your workforce. The productivity formula has been derived from the basic definition of productivity which is output per unit input or (output/input). To help you understand how to use this formula, let’s consider an example.

Suppose your company produced goods or services worth $80,000 in 16,00 hours. Then the productivity of your workforce, according to the productivity formula will be ($80,000/$1600) = $50 per hour. You can use this formula to derive the productivity of your entire organization or a particular department.

Now, after discussing different ways of measuring employee productivity, let’s explore some measures to give a boost to the efficiency of your workforce:

5 tactics to boost workplace efficiency

1. Focus on employee engagement

According to Gallup, engaged workforces exhibit 17% more productivity than their disengaged counterparts. Clearly, if you want to cultivate a highly efficient workforce, you should focus on employee engagement. Here are some tactics that can help:

• Extend regular appreciation and recognition to your workforce
• Offer growth opportunities to your employees and help them upskill
• Get rid of micromanagement
• Focus on building cordial relationships between your workers
• Enhance employee happiness by building a positive work culture and improving employee wellness

2. Reduce employee stress

Stress is inversely proportional to productivity. When you are stressed, you experience a chaotic mental state which impairs your ability to think properly, leads to physical exhaustion and makes you feel irritated. Consequently, your work efficiency reduces. The same is true for your employees.

Having said that, reducing employee stress is an effective way of enhancing employee productivity. The following are some simple tactics to help your employees with stress management:

• Conduct regular physical activity sessions in the workplace as movement reduces stress
• Organize stress management programs in the workplace
• Conduct short meditation sessions
• Help your employees learn the art of mindfulness
• Reduce the workload on your workforce if you feel that your employees are overburdened with work

3. Encourage your employees to take regular breaks in between work

Did you know that our brain is not able to maintain a constant state of productivity? Our brain is able to focus on a task for an average of 25 minutes. After that, we begin to get distracted. Multiple thoughts begin to hover in our minds or we start feeling the urge to use social media or do something else. Under such circumstances, if we continue working, without giving ourselves some time to relax, our productivity begins to decline.

However, if we take regular breaks from work, we give our brain time to restore its lost productivity and we are able to maintain our efficiency throughout the working hours. Thus, you should encourage your employees to take regular breaks in between work.

The Pomodoro Technique is the best tool to utilize in this regard. It involves working for a dedicated interval of 25 minutes and then taking a short break for 5 to 7 minutes. Once your workers start implementing the Pomodoro Technique, you’ll witness a significant increase in their efficiency.

4. Give your workforce complete autonomy to express their creative selves at work

Do you feel more productive when you have complete autonomy to work in your individual way or when you have to follow someone else’s working style? Obviously you are more productive when you have the freedom to work in your own way. The same is true for all of us. To boost workforce productivity, it’s crucial for you to give your employees complete autonomy to express their creative selves at work. Just tell them what to achieve and let them achieve it in their own way.

5. Encourage your employees to focus on a single task at a time

Research conducted at Stanford University has shown that those who multitask exhibit lower productivity. This is because when we are multitasking we constantly switch between tasks, we keep getting distracted from one task to another. When we keep getting distracted, how can we be efficient? This implies that to improve workforce productivity, you should encourage your employees to focus on a single task at a time. 

The productivity of your workforce is directly proportional to the productivity and performance of your company. Hence, it’s imperative for you to cultivate a productive workforce. For this, you should first measure the existing productivity of your workforce.