Measuring Employees’ Productivity: Yesterday’s Practices will not work for Today.

Whether it is a government entity, small business, large corporation or non for profit organization, all can agree that they would like to find a way to do more with less. In a Forbes article on “How Your Workplace Can Boost Your Bottom Line ”, the CBRE Americas CEO Jim Wilson said: “Our clients are focused on doing more and producing more with less.” which reflect what keeps a lot of executives awake during the night.?

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Early on, Employees’ Workplace Productivity has been measured and managed through assigning team supervisors at the same location as their teams. These supervisors continuously check the work progress of their teams and in many cases micro-manage them, then report back to the upper management about employees’ productivity and maybe come back with some plans to enhance productivity. Later as organizations grew in size, they had to work in multiple locations and have more layers of management, better productivity measurement and performance management practices were introduced. The new practices were mainly around identifying KPIs (Key Performance Indicators ) or OKRs (Objectives and Key Results ) that measure activity and/or result, then keep tracking it during the course of a given timeframe while giving feedback to the employees if their KPIs dropped less than the set target. With time, these KPIs and/or OKRs developed to be a part of a more robust performance management process that led to the emergence of more complex frameworks which companies used to keep track of their units and people productivity.?

Most of the above mentioned practices have been developed based on the assumptions that employees and their supervisors are working together at the same location. Thus, supervisors are able to witness their subordinates’ activity and provide feedback on the spot if needed. Also that people inside an organization are mainly interacting with each other, which makes it easy for them to grasp the instructions provided, ask for clarifications and suggest action items. This allowed the management to drill into the root-cause of any problem that might occur, or if their KPIs started showing decline of productivity. In this setting, the management can always step in between their employees to observe their work and communicate with them in person to enhance how the work is being done.?

Today, the way we work and interact with each other has changed, and thus these changes have made the customary productivity measurement and performance management practice not best suited to today’s work environment. The first change is that employees, supervisors and upper management are not working anymore in the same location. The hybrid or remote nature of our new workplace has made the same team scattered across multiple locations and in many cases different time zones. Also, in today’s work environment, people are mainly interacting with technology to produce work and get their daily tasks done. Thus, even if the set KPIs are still measuring activity and results, the ability of the management to get into the root cause of the change of their employees’ productivity is very limited as they have two layers to look at now, people practices and the technology in place.?

The critical part of the productivity equation essential to figure out how to enhance employees’ productivity is the access to the right data that describe every aspect of employees’ activity in the right time, which enables us to link it to results. Once an accurate way to measure productivity is there, management will know for sure what productivity initiatives are working and what are not.

This can be easily provided through some advanced employees’ productivity monitoring tools, supported by relevant analytics. With what Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, & Natural Language Processing have to offer to us, we have now the missing tool that can facilitate our move to a more modern productivity measurement and management solution.?

To help our community to understand more about this topic, we prepared a detailed research whitepaper on “How Productivity Intelligence Impacts Your Remote Worker s?”?

Also, we have launched a new consulting service that can help employers to measure and manage their employees’ productivity, you can visit MentorPerforma page on MENTOR Website, and download our eguide as well.?