Best Ways to Identify and Improve Employee Productivity

We all know the importance of being busy. But have we ever wondered the importance of being productive rather than busy? 

It is very important to be productive and for managers its even more important to identify the actual employee productivity. The employees who are already productive if pushed up a mile can go and crack the code for you. What could be the best ways to identify good employee productivity and then improve the same?

1. Automate – Automate – Automate

You need to first reduce your bandwidth the one you invest in redundant administrative work through automation. Automation isn’t just about using technology for productivity. It is also about its effective, and efficient use. In the current era of technology competence and capabilities, creating organizational charts on powerpoint, or performing task management over a whiteboard might seem to be fitting in the new dynamics of an office setup, but not in an efficient one. As a leader, leveraging task management dashboard not just reduces the bandwidth required for the mundane recording of task completion updates, but also ensures proper reporting of the individual contribution of the individuals in the team, and also outside it, which further eliminates the possibility of undue credit seeking, and free-riding.

2. Take Part Rather Than Interfering

As a leader, one is required to enable a workforce to produce more of their kind, which further produce more leaders in future. The problem arises when in order to win the race, the leaders tend towards taking the batons from their teammates’ hands, instead of passing more to them. The reasons could be the skepticism associated with delegating the job, or lack of an existing contingency plan involving the complete team, in case of unfortunate circumstances. This could be valuable, but definitely not sustainable for one as a leader. Hence, the key lies in intervention as a leader, and not interference. With Real Time Workforce Analytics, leaders can be on top of their game in terms of noticing the current team activities, and intervene wherever required, more as a mentor, and less as an executioner.

3. Utilise OGSM framework

OGSM is a business-planning framework like OKR that helps organizations link their long-term visions and strategies to short- and medium-term goals, actions and measures. For ensuring an effective work environment, and boosting employee productivity, promoting innovation is a must. However, for ensuring an efficient work environment, establishing a culture of planning out a structure for the ideas, and the associated objectives and key results is important. One way in which it could be done is through a dynamic task dashboard under OGSM headers. OGSM stands for:

• Objectives: Defining the long-term vision of the idea, which ought to bein-sync with the company’s vision
• Goals: The steps, or the requisite milestones that would be required for moving towards the overarching objective
• Strategies: The action plans for achieving the particular goals
• Measures: Steps required for numerically estimating the progress and ensuring the cohesion of implementation with the plan Using dashboard services, they could promote proper structuring of ideas, further leading to a cohesive and a productive work environment.

4. Keep A Record of Everything From A – Z

You need to establish a culture of documentation and storage of work and other related Information. Employee monitoring software and time tracking software help you have a record of each employees’ work. Evaluation of individual performance is one of the chief contributors of their morale, and commitment towards the organization, which directly affects their productivity. In such teams, verbal commitment, and communication of deliverables often leads to conflict amongst employees regarding appropriate division and assigning of tasks, and the credit of the work done. 

Further, it may lead to unintentionally disincentivizing the performing employees. Hence, the requirement of proper documentation and storage of work is imperative for teams to ensure that everyone’s on the same page and on the right page. Here is when the use of a remotely accessible and a robust task management board could be leveraged. 

Finding the right technology partner for HRM automation services like dashboard services, Project & Task Management services, Real Time Workforce Analytics and Documentation Assistance is not much of a task for the organizations. If you utilize tools and others the organizations and its managers could focus on thinking, executing and less on administering.

Its clear that if a manager starts recognizing productivity via proper parameters then rewarding or propelling the team for growth is not a difficult task. Once the feat is achieved, you can be the next great company which people would love working for.