Measuring your employee’s time and productivity can help you with team management in so many ways. For example, it can help you identify individuals who are not performing, while it will also help you spot flaws in processes. Armed with this information, you can then address issues accordingly, helping to ensure your business is running as smoothly as possible.
This leads to the question of how to measure employee time and productivity so you can get the information you need to make impactful decisions. To help, we’ve created this brief guide for you.
Define KPIs
Before you even get started, you need to determine which KPIs you want to measure. Developing KPIs is one of the most essential steps because you can’t measure your performance unless you know how well you are supposed to be performing.
Of course, you shouldn’t choose just any metrics. It’s important that you choose to measure metrics that give you a reasonably fair and accurate picture. For example, measuring monthly output can be misleading because some staff will have additional duties in the company. Otherwise, you may end up making detrimental rather than beneficial decisions.
Remember also that you can evolve your KPIs over time as you learn which metrics are most useful to you. It’s also good team management to tell your employees which KPIs you are using and let them know how they are performing. Once your team understands what is expected of them, it becomes easier for them to meet those expectations.
Set Milestones
Missing a milestone will make it loud and clear that something isn’t going according to plan and that something needs to be changed. However, you will need to set milestones in the first place otherwise, it becomes much harder to judge how well you are progressing.
If you missed project deadlines, it’s important to break down the process and understand why it was missed. Take it on face value and you might end up doing more harm than good. This means looking at each step of the process to see where the hold up was.
When setting milestones, it’s essential to be reasonable and realistic. If your milestones are not challenging enough, then your staff might become demotivated, and your profit margins can shrink. Making project deadlines too challenging is another motivation killer and your staff are unlikely to work well, harming efficiency and productivity.
When setting up milestones, you can also set goals for your team to aim for individually and as a collective. Goals will help give your team something to aim for and meeting goals will help keep morale high. It can also be a good idea to reward your employees occasionally for meeting goals, and even showing appreciation can help keep employees enthused.
Use Time Tracking Tools
Time tracking tools can give you a wealth of information about the performance of your employees and your business overall. Such tools can break down an employee’s working day into separate tasks, giving you insights that can be a powerful team management aid.
Some of those insights include the following:
- How much time is spent on particular tasks
- How productive an employee is compared to their colleagues
- Your employees’ attendance records
- Identifying which tasks are time-consuming and unproductive
Using time tracking tools will also help act as an effective deterrent should any of your employees be tempted to cheat or not make enough of an effort. This will help prevent unpleasant situations as well as helping to keep productivity high.
However, it’s a good idea to educate your employees on the importance of time tracking, otherwise they might object to being monitored so closely.
In addition to letting you track time, time tracking tools will also often come with other useful features that will help you manage your business effectively. For example, the time tracking and project management platform by PK4Tech offers powerful tools that help you manage your milestones and give you a comprehensive view of your operations.
Such tools are fed with masses of useful information that will help you with team management, and you will have hard, accurate data rather than incomplete information and estimates.
Hold Meetings
Hold regular meetings and get regular updates from employees. Getting together as a group will help the team communicate effectively and help the manager to guide their team in the right direction. Meetings are the ideal occasion to raise issues with your team, making for good team management that will help you come to a solution together.
Remember that meetings work both ways and it’s essential that your employees get to give their feedback as well. If there is anything wrong with the project, your employees will know about it first, so listening can help you fix issues before they become a problem.
Summary
This brief guide has covered some of the basics of measuring employee performance and productivity. It’s important to define your KPIs before you get started and let everybody know what is expected of them in terms of productivity.
You should also set project deadlines to help you track progress, and regular meetings will help ensure you get essential feedback and you get full updates on how well everything is going. And last but by no means least, use time tracking software to help you gather and use data to help you make the right decisions. Remember, the information at your disposal can make the difference between success and failure, so it makes sense to put that data to work.
Photo by Cathryn Lavery on Unsplash
