If you’re a manager or owner of a business, you may struggle a little to measure employee productivity.
There are many people, projects, and to-do lists that you need to oversee and it may seem like a day is not enough for all that needs to be done.
As a leader, it’s crucial to know the difference between managing and micromanaging. Micromanaging can easily lead to demotivated and underappreciated employees who aren’t willing to give it their all at work. Naturally, this can result in significant productivity losses.
Tracking employee productivity is more about ensuring that worker output is in line with what needs to be achieved and should not force you to do their work for them. It’s important to demonstrate trust and encouragement towards your employees and inspire them to take initiative regarding pressing matters that affect your business.
This will not only help you focus your limited time on more important tasks but will also build morale among your employees.
Employee productivity is a predominant attribute of successful organizations. It can directly impact business performance and indirectly correlate to revenue. There’s an abundance of studies and statistics that demonstrate the importance of employee productivity and engagement for organizational outcomes.
It’s no surprise that there are plenty of factors that can affect employee productivity. Keeping checks on these factors can help you finetune employee performance and increase productivity at your place of work.
Nowadays, thousands of companies track employee productivity using software that monitors the progress and performance of their employees. More often, this software can help you oversee your employees’ tasks easily and accurately.
However, if you don’t use this software properly, you risk falling into the trap of micromanaging your employees. In essence, you might be negatively impacting your employees’ productivity, losing out on their trust, and affecting the growth of your company.
While it’s important to track employee productivity, it’s crucial to remember that micromanaging is not the way to go about it.
If you want to track employee productivity and avoid micromanagement, all you need to do is oversee their progress and provide constructive feedback. Timely and accurate feedback is a very important part of the employee experience and can track employee productivity over time.
Knowing how their performance is perceived, how well they have performed, and what they can do to improve their work can make a noticeable difference in the performance and productivity among your employees.
Occasional breaks are natural, simply because your employees are human and not robots! If these breaks are properly-timed and managed, they can even lead to greater productivity over time, simply because they have time to blow off some steam.
Always remember that the goal is to track employee productivity, not scrutinize every single thing employees do while they’re at work. As long as they’re getting better and are producing high-quality work, that’s all that matters.
Give your employees an overview of what you’re expecting from specific tasks and give them the freedom to make their own decisions. This prevents you from focusing on little details and places trust on what your employees are capable of doing.
If you know what to expect from your employees, you’ll be able to detect poor performance and respond to that effectively. You will have data gathered from your employees’ past performances that could help detect performance issues and track employee productivity over time.
While the use of technology is an effective method of tracking employee productivity, your teams may find your efforts too intrusive and believe that they’re being monitored because they can’t be trusted.
Before implementing these policies, therefore, educate your employees about your tracking procedures and policies and address their concerns.
Track employee productivity through their progress and the feedback you give them, accept minor dips in productivity, set goals and expectations, and inform them about your monitoring processes to avoid micromanagement.
Make use of the multitude of insights that monitoring software offers and lead your company towards growth with confidence!
