Organizations have experienced a paradigm shift in how they interact, function, and operate. The spotlight has suddenly shifted to Human Resource leaders across industries to devise new initiatives and policies to foster team building, employee engagement, and productivity.
In today’s competitive markets, investing in the organizations’ workforce lays a solid foundation for a company’s progress. New-age companies are strategically evaluating employee performance and leveraging technology with robust policies to bolster employee productivity and morale.
This article explores employee productivity, its importance, ways to improve it, and insights into technology that companies can leverage to enhance performance.
What Is Meant by Employee Productivity?
Employee Productivity is an assessment of the employee’s efficiency based on the amount of work or output produced within a specified time frame. Companies assess the productivity of a particular employee by measuring the results generated in consideration of the goals set and the inputs or resources made available to achieve them.
A company’s long-term success hinges on the productivity of its employees and its ability to track, monitor, and take proactive measures to improve performance.
But it doesn’t have to be complicated. As Caroline Ghosn said, “Productivity doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be easily boosted through a manageable combination of the right tools, resources, and habits to make the most of your time.”
What Is the Importance of Employee Productivity?
Productive employees are growth accelerators who generate revenue and help companies achieve organizational goals. They are focused, committed, and perseverant in leading organizations towards success.
But there are more benefits that productive employees offer to an organization:
1. Motivated workforceProductive employees are rewarded with a pay raise, bonus, and medical benefits that further motivate them to perform better. The higher the percentage of productive employees, the more inspired the workforce is towards contributing to the company’s growth.
2. Increased revenue generation
Productive employees are self-driven and deliver higher returns to the company over the years. Such employees build effective teams that improve revenues, increased profitability, and accelerated growth.
3. Positive employee engagement
A productive workforce leads to increased employee participation in the company’s mission. Productive employees are proactive and involve themselves in company discussions and activities, leading to enhanced contribution and improved employee engagement.
Learn More: Designing The Employee Engagement Journey in the Digital Age
4. Happy customers
Productivity at the workplace translates into efficient service and interaction with the customers. Engaged and productive employees go beyond their KPIs, take responsibility, and do what’s necessary to continually meet and exceed clients’ expectations.
What Are the Best Ways to Measure Employee Productivity?
Leaders can measure employee productivity in various ways like setting standards, ensuring periodic reviews, and seeking timely feedback, to name a few.
Here are some of the best ways to measure employee productivity:
1. Establish a baseline metric
The first and step is to set standards for every position in the organization. These standards clarify the desired expectation from a particular role to both the employer and the employee.
A clear baseline metric makes it easier for employers to measure progress and course correct for improved performance.
2. Monitor quality of work
Quality work within the designated timelines is one of the essential criteria when assessing an employee’s productivity.
When managers monitor the quality of work done by an employee, they measure productivity while maintaining standards of services and offerings to the end customer.
Learn More: 10 HR Data Analytics Metrics You Should be Tracking
3. Obtain client feedback
Clients are the best judge of organizational effectiveness and a great yardstick to measure the efficiency of the employees. Seeking client feedback and experience can help organizations measure and improve employee productivity.
4. Frequent check-ins
Frequent monitoring allows managers to proactively ensure timely and good quality work, which is a better measure of productivity than yearly performance assessments.
Companies can track performance by getting daily updates on tasks or organizing weekly/monthly catch-up meets where managers can check in on their employees’ work and guide them periodically.
What Are the Best Ways To Increase Employee Productivity?
Productive employees generate manifold returns to any company and are an essential asset for its long-term success.
Here are the 22 best ways to increase employee productivity at the workplace:
1. Effective communication
Effective communication is vital in every relationship. Clear cut communication between the employer and employee leaves no room for ambiguity or misunderstanding and enables employees to perform the given task better.
Organizations can use project management tools to facilitate effective communication and ensure everyone is always on the same page. This will, in turn, enhance employee productivity.
Learn More: 10 Key Reasons Why Internal Communication is Important
2. Set clear team goals and individual goals
Employee productivity tends to increase with clearly set goals that can be tracked and measured like the OKR methodology. Companies can set team goals to ensure progress as a team. Additionally, companies can encourage employees to set individual goals and provide opportunities for personal and professional growth. This approach will improve employee performance across the organization and enhance productivity.
3. Understand employees’ skills
Every employee has different skills, interests, strengths, and weaknesses. If managers understand these nuanced abilities and match responsibilities accordingly, it will empower the employee to work to their full potential.
4. Delegate and distribute
In understanding the skill sets of their team members, managers should also effectively delegate the work to them. Delegation of responsibility inculcates a sense of trust, ownership, and accountability within the employees and helps them grow.
5. Offer monetary rewards
Workplace recognition positively correlates to employee productivity. Companies can provide recognition to their employees with monetary rewards such as performance bonuses and increments and qualitative rewards to increase productivity. They improve employee motivation, performance and eventually fuel business growth.
Learn More: A Guide To Designing The Perfect Employee Rewards Program
6. Conduct periodic employee reviews
In most organizations, performance management and appraisal discussions are routines conducted once a year for the sake of it. Periodic employee reviews enable managers to discuss employees’ progress, evaluate their strengths, identify areas of improvement, and offer them an opportunity to develop their abilities and improve performance.
7. Invest in learning and development
If companies wish to survive in this fast-paced world, they must invest in the learning and development of their employees. Companies can constantly challenge their employees to push beyond their comfort zone and broaden their knowledge. Periodic learning interventions will improve employee performance, build loyalty toward the company, and reduce employee turnover.
8. Check-in on employees’ well-being
Ensuring your employees’ well-being is essential to improve productivity. These may include mental health surveys, collaboration with doctors to guide employees on their physical and psychological health, and encouraging honest conversations on support needed with managers and leaders. Such surveys can be automated using a robust HR Tech suite that helps track employee morale and wellbeing trends regularly and take corrective action.
Companies can also arrange events where employees can have fun and unwind, like sports days, fitness timeouts, and wellness days. These can help employees with an outlet to release stress, rejoin work with renewed energy, and improve overall productivity. Such initiatives can be executed using company social media channels that many HR Tech systems now provide.
9. Collect feedback
It is necessary to provide an open environment wherein employees feel free to express their opinions and concerns. This will also bring to knowledge potential threats that could hamper the growth of employees and help address them proactively.
Learn More: The 30 Best Employee Feedback examples in 2022
10. Offer employees authority
Offering employees roles or tasks of authority improves employee performance and job satisfaction.
Companies must assign reliable employee responsibilities with a certain degree of authority and freedom, trusting that they will perform well. This will allow employees to assume ownership, accountability, and an opportunity to prove their worth. It will also inculcate a sense of responsibility towards the organization, thus improving productivity.
11. Promptly resolve conflicts
Conflicts are natural in a workplace. However, they tend to hinder overall organizational growth when left unresolved. For companies to prevent conflicts from hampering overall productivity, it is important to plan timely conflict management interventions and ensure healthy workplace relationships.
12. Build a positive culture
A positive work environment directly affects the overall mental state of the employee and thus their productivity. As employees spend a significant part of their day in the workplace, it is important to ensure no toxicity in the work environment. Managers can maintain a positive work culture by building a solid rapport with their employees, seeking regular feedback, and simply listening to their ideas and suggestions.
13. Seamless onboarding process
Joining a new organization comes with its own jitters, even for seasoned professionals. Companies must give sufficient thought to onboarding processes to ensure new joiners feel welcomed from day 1. New Joiners must receive comprehensive information on internal ways of working at a steady pace to help them build confidence and eventually boost their productivity.
14. Encourage employees to make mistakes
Employees tend to grow when they have the freedom to experiment, make mistakes, and learn from them. It is thus vital to allow employees some room to try new approaches and enable them to grow by reviewing their success and identifying areas of improvement.
15. Align core values and beliefs
A company’s values and beliefs act as a north star in guiding employees in their actions and decisions. Clear values help employees understand the business and guide them to navigate difficult circumstances smoothly, and improve overall productivity.
16. Set realistic deadlines
For any task to be completed on time, it is vital to provide a deadline. However, setting unrealistic deadlines can hamper the work quality, create stress and overwhelm the employees, thus hampering productivity. You can set realistic and manageable deadlines to improve employees’ quality of work, motivation, and productivity.
17. Be good listeners
When leaders are good listeners and keep their ears open to new ideas and initiatives from the employees, they instill a sense of belonging and loyalty to the organization. Such belongingness directly enhances accountability and improves the productivity of employees.
18. Discourage multitasking
Most people cannot do too many tasks simultaneously, and several studies have proved that multitasking is ineffective. Companies seeking to improve productivity need to be cautious that they do not overburden employees for the sake of productivity.
Instead, employees must be encouraged to focus on one task and perform it to the best of their potential. This will result in enhanced efficiency and increased productivity.
19. Permit breaks between work
Sitting in one place for hours can drain the energy and heavily impact employees’ performance. When an organization encourage employees to take periodic breaks, it increases their efficiency and overall productivity.
Some organizations have also introduced sleeping pods for employees to have a quick nap in their workspaces. This allows them to restart their work with increased energy and vigor, thus positively affecting productivity.
20. Kick-start the day on the right note
It’s proven that beginning the day on the right note helps set the momentum for the rest of the day. Managers can leverage this and use morning stand up calls to motivate their teams to be more efficient, clarify the intentions for the day, encourage people to take up complicated tasks, offer support, and be approachable to improve employee productivity.
21. Conduct anonymous reviews
Anonymous peer reviews of team members by leaders allow employees to share their honest opinions without fear or worry of consequences. Such balanced and unbiased reviews enable every employee to reflect on their actions and help them improve for the benefit of the overall organization.
22. Offer flexibility
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has made employees more open to working from home or hybrid work models. Working from home is beneficial to some employees as it minimizes commute and allows employees to work from the comfort of their homes. At the same time, other groups prefer the camaraderie of a workspace and water cooler conversations. Offering flexibility and agency to employees on how they’d like to work can improve morale and productivity.
How Can HR Technology Help Improve Employee Productivity?
Technology is transforming rapidly and making all walks of life easier in today's world, and human resources are no exception. Today, various technology-driven solutions are available to HR executives to help them set goals, monitor periodically, and boost employee productivity.
Here are a few ways HR technology is helping organizations improve employee productivity:
1. Automated recruitments
Recruitments across hierarchies can be highly tedious and time-consuming for HR teams. From finding suitable candidates to screening their resumes, scheduling and conducting interviews, and communicating back and forth, a lot of valuable time is lost.
Artificial intelligence and intelligent software solutions that automate the end-to-end process enable companies to streamline and simplify recruitment. With Darwinbox HRMS, companies can seamlessly post jobs on multi-platforms, screen and find eligible candidates through pre-defined automated assessments, track and maintain ongoing conversations with the candidate and improve the overall HR team's productivity.
2. Digital onboarding
Onboarding employees involves filling out joining forms and tedious paperwork that completely consumes a new candidate’s bandwidth in the initial days of joining. Such time can be used to better learn about the company and the expectations from the role to start meaningfully contributing to the organization.
Integrated HRMS solutions like Darwinbox ensure that candidates’ data is captured from the first point of contact to minimize duplication of efforts and simplify onboarding processes. Once all necessary information is captured, companies can employ AI-powered document validation to avoid spending many hours on manual authentication and verification. This allows HR teams to offer a smooth onboarding experience to recruits while setting them up to begin work from day one.
Learn More: Remote Onboarding Checklist For Your Employees In 2022
3. Performance management
The entire performance review and assessment process is a daunting and overwhelming task for both the managers and employees. The amount of time spent on administrative tasks related to performance reviews can instead be invested in having meaningful developmental conversations between managers and team members.
Moreover, performance appraisal is a one-time conversation in several companies that happens annually and contributes little to employee growth and development. Periodically evaluating employee performance is a holistic approach to enhancing employee productivity.
Implementation of a comprehensive performance management system that specifies a clear job description, and key performance areas, offers real-time feedback, facilitates online training and coaching, and timely developmental interventions– allow for continuous tracking and improvement of employee productivity.
Darwinbox’s performance management suite empowers managers and HR professionals to streamline appraisal processes and digitally evaluate employees without spending too much time on admin tasks. The suite offers various features such as libraries to maintain the goals and skills of their employees, frequent check-ins and performance updates, and a platform to give and receive feedback in real-time, to name a few. Our Performance Management System has helped many large organizations like Netflix, Delhivery, and Paytm track and monitor employee productivity and continually enhance overall performance.
4. E-learning and training
Learning is vital to keep pace with today's fast-paced, ever-changing business environment. However, in dynamic work environments matching schedules for all team members and organizing in-person training interventions frequently can be cumbersome.
The advent of various learning management systems offers employees online access to diverse courses to sharpen their skills and grow. With e-learning and training platforms, employees can now continually upskill and improve their knowledge on-demand at their pace.
Time To Take Your Employee Productivity to an All New High
Employee productivity is imperative for the overall growth and success of any organization. Companies need to reinvent their processes and constantly strive toward improving employee productivity to ensure continued success.
Darwinbox has partnered with leading companies across industries to implement its comprehensive HRMS solutions leveraging the latest technology to improve employee productivity and enhance the organization’s performance. Click here to learn more from our experts.
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