No matter what kind of products or services your team delivers, measuring productivity as accurately as possible is crucial for success. Whatever your team’s goals, it’s essential to find the methods of measurement that show how well the output brings you closer to your team’s goals.
Find your KPIs
Before you select the productivity methods for your team, find your key performance indicators (KPIs). Your KPIs must come directly from your team’s goals and must relate only to those aspects of your team that you have some control over. When determining how successful your team is, make sure to include any kind of factor that might affect it. Here are five top methods for accurately measuring productivity:
1. Management By Objectives
To use this method accurately, you must think of specific long-term goals, split them into tasks, and then measure productivity based on the contribution towards the goal. Make sure you evaluate the progress regularly to track the progress of the current goal. You don’t need to care about time spent on tasks or how many of them you’ve finished. The main thing here is reaching the final goal, therefore all your actions should be in that direction.
2. Measuring Productivity Quantitatively
The quantitative measurement method is the effortless way to measure productivity depending on how many tasks the workplace can process per day or month. You need to consider all factors, including the training time, fixing time, and lunch breaks. This approach assumes that each person has their own KPIs for which they are responsible and keeps track of how much they can accomplish over some time.
3. Profit Is Productivity
Like in business, profit is everything. So, it makes sense to measure your team’s productivity based on the profit it makes. The productivity = profit measurement measures how much profit the team earns for every dollar it spends on the salary. If the revenue increases, the team is more productive. After all, what’s the point of your team working hard if it is not able to generate any profits?
4. The 360-Degree Strategy
This strategy involves the active use of feedback from your team. You rely on the claim that team members’ performance is measured by everyone involved. Seems illogical, but in some cases, it can work. Feedback should be in terms of how significantly everyone contributed to the team’s goal. Given all of the above, you need to prepare your team so that everyone agrees to provide effective feedback. Evaluations should be fair and relate only to the team’s contribution to achieving the goals, excluding personal feelings and subjective judgments.
5. Use a dedicated app
With the rapid rise of remote work, teams find themselves with many different types of communication and productivity tools. The problem is all of these tools rarely integrate with others, and using too many tools altogether may contribute to information loss. Luckily there’s a brand new category of tools emerging, a combination of all solutions in one place. These products category exists at the intersection of productivity, and collaboration tools. They allow simply calculating the average production of the day or productivity of each person per hour, day, or month.
More important, before implementing any method, first build trust within the team and inform everyone about the productivity measuring methods used. This will guarantee that everyone is on the same page while contributing to the team’s goal.
