Unveiling The Secrets of Improved Employee Productivity: Beyond Input and Output
Everyone’s talking about productivity, AI, and streamlining the workforce. Increasing productivity is equated with accelerating growth, which is a key goal for any business. Measuring actual monetary growth is easy with balance sheets, but measuring employee productivity is trickier.
The basic way to measure productivity is using input and output, discussed in detail here. To summarize, the formula is Total Output (or Revenue)/Total Input (Hours) = Productivity. You take your total sales in a given period, and total input is the number of hours it took your business to achieve those sales. This will give you a dollar value per hour of collective work.
While this method may give you a starting point for measuring performance, management can become too laser-focused on the number of work hours if it is the only metric you are considering. There are so many other measurable and unmeasurable factors that can impact productivity that you can gauge and tweak if needed.
The Role of Efficient Collaboration in Driving Employee Productivity
Collaboration is another word you’re going to see a lot of in relation to productivity. But there’s a reason for that: effective collaboration does measurably increase productivity. The key word here is “effective.” Productivity-killers like endless meetings are often viewed as collaboration, but they are best held sparingly. Collaboration isn’t about employees talking to each other non-stop; it’s about bringing ideas together for a specific purpose. Leaders should inspire a culture in which staff feel free to collaborate rather than artificially forcing interaction.
The Harvard Business Review backs up the fact that forced interaction through meetings, phone calls, and video calls actually kills productivity rather than fostering collaboration. Some organizations are auditing scheduled interactions with organizational network analysis tools and canceling meetings and other interactions that keep employees away from their core purpose: work.
The right tech tools make speedy collaboration easier. Slack channels provide immediate access to the company's brain trust, for example, and editing files in the cloud in real-time saves endless emails back and forth. Leaders should focus on making collaboration easier with these tools and mitigating unnecessary reviews and meetings. Eliminating roadblocks is also important; we have an entire guide to doing it here.
Will vs. Skill: Keeping Your Team Motivated and Learning
Will is all about motivation, mindset and effort while skill is technical proficiency. Both drive productivity in almost equal parts. Let’s assume for the most part that your team has the technical proficiency they need already, with some room for upskilling. Motivation is where management can work to balance that skill with effort.
In order to successfully motivate and engage employees, leaders have to develop their persuasive leadership skills. A persuasive leader will know how to get their teams behind goals and projects and drive success; a top-down leader just throws things at their team and tells them to get it done, inspiring little to no motivation.
There is a close link between motivation and employee engagement. A disengaged employee won’t have the drive to truly excel. In order to get them into a space where they can be motivated, you need to re-engage them by matching their own individual drive to the company’s purpose. This is done by finding out exactly what has disengaged them and fixing it, where possible, and finding other ways to re-engage them if the core issue cannot be immediately addressed.
Measuring Worker Productivity With the Right Tools
Don’t worry about setting up spreadsheets to track input and output in order to measure productivity. We have a better way of handling that with Prodoscore. Our employee productivity monitoring solution is a transparent way to track productivity at the individual, team, and company levels. This data is presented to each team member so they can self-coach and pinpoint ways to maximize productivity. Prodoscore helps to gamify productivity so that your staff are always motivated when they see how much they’ve accomplished.
The data from Prodoscore allows you as a leader and your team as individuals to celebrate achievements. How many times have you left work feeling like you got nothing done? If you look back on the data of your day, you may see that you sent 40 emails, completed two presentations, fielded 10 requests from other staff, and many other data points that will help you feel more accomplished.
