How to Measure Employee Productivity

Employee productivity is an outcome of the employee's knowledge, capability, motivation, workplace environment, etc. Generally, productivity is defined as output gained from the fixed amount of inputs. Likewise, it is the output gained by the inputs of the employee, with a goal to bring out profit to the company and to the employee himself.

Enhancing an employee's productivity is not only dependent on the inputs of the employee, but also by the aid provided by the organization and the nature of workplace environment.

For this, you need to calculate an employee's qualitative and quantitative work. It can be calculated on a monthly basis, yearly basis or by daily assessment. Before measuring an employee's productivity, it is necessary to determine what are outputs to be measured.

If an employer expects too much output from the employees, they will find shortcuts to achieve the expected benchmark and as a result, quality will suffer. Conversely, if less productivity is expected, the company's overall performance will decline because of inefficient use of available resources.

If a manager wants to measure employee's productivity in the organization, he needs to know how to use certain basic software tools such as bar graph, pie chart, speadsheet etc.

This type of measurement is to know whether an employee is able to complete the specific task at a given period, and how much time or days he/she takes to accomplish the assigned work (for example: how long it takes for an employee to deliver a service or produce a specific product). This is an important measure to find out the overall delivery of service.

Timeliness can be measured by setting up a track system in a computer, that calculates the employee's work from the time the work was assigned to the time of completion of the work.

Balance scorecard is one of the efficient performance measurement tools employed in industries, business organizations, government offices, etc., to monitor and process daily activities of the employees.

Performance metrics is one of the evaluation techniques that is used in organizations to quantify the performance of an employee. Performance metrics is developed mostly to determine the health of the ongoing project of a company. The main objective of performance metrics is to align the customer requirements with the values of the company.

Process of developing performance metrics is as follows:

• Identifying the customer requirements
• Developing measures such as time, cost, quality of work, resources, scope of the project and the required action to be implemented
• Establishing targets and finally measuring the scores achieved by each employee

These values are computed using mathematical models.

Conducting surveys of the customers that frequently interact with your employees will help to analyze the performance or productivity of an employee. After all, customer satisfaction is the ultimate target for a good organization.

If an employee knows that he/she is evaluated for the service provided by him/her to the customers, he/she will be more likely to perform and act appropriately at his best. 

It is a better practice for the employer to perform a 360° review of each customer in order to evaluate the way the employee provides services to the customer. This kind of approach will give a fair review of an employee's productivity, as more people are involved in the performance evaluation method than just the first-line manager or supervisor.

By having the random sample work and review sheet of an employee, accuracy can be measured. Some of the factors that should be considered to measure the accuracy of an employee's work are:

• Quantity of work to measured
• Criteria used to measure accuracy (depending on the company)
• Frequency of the reviews
• Minimum level of acceptable quality

After acquiring the information, it should be stored in the company's database to retrieve the data whenever it is required. It also helps to identify the patterns that need changes and correction.

The employee's performance can be calculated by obtaining data of the production quantity of each employee, and then building up a statistics model of each individual's output. By observing the pattern of the model over time, the production profit or loss can be calculated with respect to the workers.

• Identifying the skills of each employees
• Giving appropriate feedback to the employees without discouraging them
• Emphasizing on the positive points to develop productive work

• Providing continuous training to the employees on multidimensional work
• Most importantly, discussing the measures with the employees and getting their feedback, to improve the productivity

Finally, employees are the building blocks of any organization. The organization should provide all its possible support to enhance the productivity of the company. The organization should ensure that it receives full contribution from each and every employee working in it.

If the employees are not satisfied, the customers will not be satisfied and consequently, it will lead to the organization's decline. So, measuring the employee's productivity and taking necessary steps to enhance it is absolutely necessary for an organization's success.