As a business owner, you’ve likely encountered low productivity from your staff. Low employee productivity is a business problem that affects every organization large and small.
In many cases, owners may feel they are not getting enough output from an employee for the salay paid. It can be even more challenging to identify if you have an employee productivity issues if you have no means or framework for monitoring employee productivity.
Below are a few helpful methods that you can use to monitor employee productivity.
Employee Support
Employees engage in work processes with the information they have. Today’s productivity shortages is often the result of either lack of information or information overload.
Employees can be supported by you clearly defining operations and the work they need to do. By defining this and making it clear on a consistent basis you help employees know how and why the business functions and what their specific context is.
Curating information for employees to start from is a right way to prevent information overload. By preventing information overload, you provide employees the ability to jump right into work with the clarity of what needs to be done.
Tasks Completed
The first thought that comes to mind for many managers when discussing employee productivity is to measure hours logged or computer activity. This is a good starting point but can often become a barrier to getting work done, and you face limitations when analyzing productivity.
Measuring work time and computer activity is powerful and can provide a wealth of insight but do not reflect how much an employee is efficiently fulfilling the mission of your business. One of the most effective methods for measuring employee productivity and the fulfillment of your mission is to track tasks completed by employees.
Time alone is unreliable to determine quality and efficiency. By monitoring tasks in addition to time, you help generate a collective feeling of accomplishment among your staff.
Passive Time Tracking
As mentioned above the first among managers is time tracking, but it is a traditional form of time tracking that requires employees to input their time entries. Unfortunately, this analog method of time tracking does not integrate well with other human resource management systems or payroll. Most importantly, analog time tracking does not provide the data you need to improve productivity.
Fortunately, technology today allows for passive time tracking. For your employees, this will simply be the click of a button that starts a timer while they’re working. Passive time tracking provides productivity data. This usually comes in the form of activity monitoring, background screenshots, application usage, website monitoring, idle time vs active time, and customized indicators.
Passive time tracking, when paired with task measurement, can give you comprehensive data for productivity analysis.
Helpful Solutions
The approaches above are good, but they may require that you procure software from several different vendors while not being able to integrate them all together for an easy to manage productivity analysis system. Ultimately, you want a solution that helps you understand how your organization is doing in general.
One of the most affordable and comprehensive solutions available right now is Teramind. The software allows passive time tracking and monitoring, customized productivity indicators, task tracking, and productivity report generation. With an integrated set of tracking methods, you can easily determine how you can improve workforce effectiveness.
Teramind has a free trial for the first 14 days and after that is an affordable flat rate for up to five users. You can find out more about Teramind here.
