If you want to measure employee productivity, focus on quality, not quantity.

Productivity is a top priority for businesses, and a major concern for many of them, which means that productive employees are the ones most valued by their employers. But how can they measure how well their people are performing?

Measuring employee productivity is an important part of HR’s role, however, performance can be difficult to measure due to workflow variations within an organisation. There are two types of performance metrics, quantitative and qualitative, and both allow employers to track individual performance. Quantitative metrics measure the amount of work that an individual produces, while qualitative metrics gauge the quality of the work that they produce.

The quantitative approach is more effective in some business functions than others. In Sales organisations, for example, the amount of revenue being brought in is tangible and therefore easy to measure. In non-revenue generating areas, such as HR and Operations, there is less tangible data to measure and some quantitative metrics are useless as a measure of productivity. The amount of time employees spend in the office, for example, doesn’t necessarily reflect how productive they are. Someone may be the first in the office and last to leave but could be spending much of the day scrolling through their social media without doing much work. On the other hand, someone who is more structured and effective with their time is likely to finish their work more quickly and potentially spend less time in the office.

The proposed four-day work week is an example of this. Although some employers are opposed to the idea, it has been proven that the average time spent working can be condensed because there is focused time spent working, usually with a clear structure and goals.

Overall quality and completion of work within a required timeframe and without missing deadlines are key to measuring employee productivity. To obtain that overview of workforce productivity, organisations need to value quality over quantity, and quality of work can often come down to how engaged employees are feeling.

A business needs to be performing well to be productive, but does that necessarily tie into people's values and the reasons why they work for that organisation? Not always. We know that employee productivity is closely linked to engagement, which is derived from several factors, including happiness, motivation, and job satisfaction. When engagement levels fall, usually, so does productivity. Here, HR has an important role to play in gauging these factors among employees, for example, through employee surveys to highlight issues that might be preventing employees from performing at their best.

Culture is also another important factor. Where many organisations go wrong is in enforcing overly stringent measures to gauge productivity which impact employee engagement and productivity. Ultimately it comes down to trust, and at a time when hybrid and remote working have become mainstream, trust is even more important.

Maintaining productivity among remote and hybrid working employees requires high levels of trust. When people feel empowered to work from home, are able to connect and engage with a strong working group and have the support from their manager, they are more likely to do better quality work. Conversely, if productivity levels fall when people are working remotely, simply imposing a ‘return to office’ policy rather than identifying the cause of the problem will result in a workforce becoming completely disengaged through a lack of trust. This will further impact work quality and productivity.

It is important for managers to feel empowered to trust remote teams to do their jobs in a way that allows them to manage their time and job priorities autonomously, and be more productive. This can be measured qualitatively, with managers setting daily and weekly targets with their teams, remote or office-based, on a micro and macro level to measure overall productivity, with individual goals for each team member and wider goals for the team as a whole. They also need to trust their teams to deliver on these objectives to the required standards, independently; two employees can be set the same quality targets but may finish within different timeframes due to different working styles.

HR has a significant role to play in the qualitative measurement of productivity, because they have their finger on the pulse of employee happiness and satisfaction, key drivers of productivity, and can raise issues that could cause people to become less engaged, less productive, and increasingly likely to leave.

When organisations fail to see the value of the People function in measuring and supporting productivity, they are more likely to see productivity fall. Those organisations that enjoy the highest levels of workforce performance are the ones driving productivity from within a culture where everyone feels able to do their best work, and where quality prevails over quantity.