Can You Calculate Employee Productivity?
In the modern workplace, productivity means everything. The success of your business depends on the productivity of your workforce, and their success within your business and ability to move up the ladder, is largely dependent on their productivity. If your team isn’t working to meet their highest output potential, your business probably isn’t as successful as it could be - this means losing out on sales and ultimately profits, missing out on promising leads, and trailing behind your competition.
With so much importance placed on productivity in the modern workplace, employers are constantly looking for ways to accurately measure how productive their employees are, using their findings to identify ways they can increase productivity while keeping employees happy and healthy. This race has turned productivity into something of a science - businesses with the right equations and ideal solutions now lead the pack.
Calculating employee productivity
Unfortunately, calculating employee productivity isn’t quite as easy as it seems. With so many external factors influencing the productivity of your employees, including stress, work-life balance, available business tools, and workplace culture and environment, it can be difficult to accurately calculate exactly how productive they are at all times. In addition to external factors, there are so many intangibles which, at first glance, don’t appear to be “productive.” These intangibles include critical things like research and brainstorming that are essential to the success of your business.
Despite these external factors and intangibles, there are ways to generally calculate productivity. This is done through the following equation:
Total Output (or Sales)/Total Input (Hours) = Productivity
“Total Output/Sales” is the amount your business has generated in a given period, and “Total Input/Hours” is the amount of hours it took to reach the desired output. The total “Productivity” will be how much your business generates per hour of work. This equation can be used to roughly calculate the productivity of specific employees, teams, or departments. If you wish to break this equation down to teams or departments, you can calculate it as follows:
Total Sales/Number of Employees = Productivity
Using this calculation, you’ll uncover how much is generated by each employee in a given period, allowing you to determine productivity across teams or departments. If you’re trying to calculate the productivity of your entire workforce from top to bottom, it gets infinitely more complicated, and involves the use of some long spreadsheets and more difficult formulas.
Calculations can be ineffective
Unfortunately, due to the general difficulty of applying these calculations to non-sales staff, the above formulas can’t easily determine how productive some valuable members of your team really are. This includes customer service representatives, human resources, service providers, payroll, and more.
This can lead you to use vague criteria, like measuring the amount of tasks performed by each employee, which ignores many of the previously mentioned intangibles. It also fails to take into consideration the fact that some tasks simply take longer to complete - some customer service calls can be completed in a matter of minutes, and others will take far more time to effectively resolve.
A more accurate (and human) way to determine employee productivity
Unless you have a real penchant for maintaining long and complicated spreadsheets, you’re probably interested in finding out if there’s an easier way to calculate employee productivity. Thankfully, there is. Using measurable business insights offered by solutions like Prodosore, you can instantly gain visibility into the productivity of your employees using one simple score. This score is determined by machine learning, AI, and natural language processing that works to measure the activity of your employees in CRM solutions, office software, communications tools, and other workplace staples, all in real-time.
Productivity scores can be used to predict and improve revenue results, improve employee retention and the adoption of cloud tools and software, identify employees who may require additional support, enhance coaching, and find previously unseen opportunities for improvement. This is a more human approach to measuring productivity, giving you a more accurate picture of how your employees are spending their time without missing out on the valuable intangibles that come with so many jobs.
Since each role within your company is unique, and expectations are different per employee, team, and department, Prodoscore measures the productivity of employees based on more than just the profit they manage to bring in during any given period. You can see trends form in real-time, allowing you to intervene when an employee’s performance suddenly drops, recognize outstanding performance and achievements, and better keep track of what tools your workforce tends to favor. Forget endless (and meaningless) spreadsheets and complicated formulas - with business insights, you can get all the information you need with one simple score.
Calculating employee productivity shouldn’t be a dehumanizing process filled with complex formulas and difficult spreadsheets. When you harness the power of business insights, you gain the ability to replicate top employees, build relationships of trust that help you improve employee retention, and accurately predict and improve revenue results driven by a productive workforce.
