Money might make the business world go ‘round, but that doesn’t mean that revenue should be the only KPI on your list. In fact, revenue is but one of the essential KPIs you need to monitor on a continuous basis in order to gauge your company’s performance in the competitive market, assess risks and opportunities, fill market gaps, and execute your long-term growth strategy efficiently and effectively. This means that you should also focus on the key performance indicators that provide information about employee productivity and how it relates to the success of your operation.
Now, obviously, productivity in itself is a metric, but it’s important to note that it’s comprised of numerous different KPIs that give you the details you need to make the right hiring, management, sales, support, and other decisions to fuel business growth. With that in mind, let’s go over the five KPIs you should track in order to improve productivity over the long-term.
Overall labor effectiveness
Starting with human resources and how the department answers crucial staffing questions in a growing company, the overall labor effectiveness metric should give you a broad overview of the effectiveness of key processes like shift management, staff numbers, sales vs the number of hires, and much more. This metric is especially important for operations that can’t afford to lose any money on a surplus of staff or processes that aren’t sustainable in the face of evolving industry and market trends, such as a startup operating in a competitive marketplace.
You can calculate this metric by simply dividing the sales volume with the number of employees, which will give you a straightforward, albeit a somewhat simplified overview. It’s important to keep context and other key indicators in mind when assessing overall labor effectiveness in order to gauge the true productive output, such as quality control, delivery on promises, time and attendance, and the involvement of each department in sales growth.
Average task completion rate
To complement the above, you should also keep an eye on the average task completion rate. This is a useful metric if you’re trying to figure out what the ideal time should be for completing certain tasks in your company while maintaining employee productivity, zeal, and health over the long term. Typically, this metric is applied to repetitive tasks that numerous members of your team come across on a regular basis, which will give you a rough overview of the effectiveness of the individual.
What’s important to keep in mind here is that the average task completion rate shouldn’t be the norm, rather, it should be a starting point you use when you’re setting deadlines for your team members. This metric can tell you how long different parts of a project should last, so that you can allocate resources and adjust your prices accordingly.
Time spent on non-work-related websites
Idle time or time spent browsing non-work-related content is directly chipping away at your revenue potential, your employees’ productivity, and your operation as a whole. Sure, your team members should find a way to relax from time to time during their day, and they should take a break from work in regular intervals, but there is a difference between taking a constructive break and wasting your company’s time.
This is why you need to monitor the online activity of your employees through a comprehensive secure web gateway that also allows you to limit and control their access to non-work-related websites. This is not only important if you’re looking to maintain productivity and eliminate distractions, but also if you’re looking to enhance the cybersecurity of your office and put your data centers out of harm’s way.
Overtime per employee
Now, the overtime metric is not a productivity metric per se because the amount of overtime your employees accrue shouldn’t infer a direct correlation to their level of productivity, but it is a useful metric nonetheless. To read this metric in the right way, context will be essential. The context in which your employees accrue overtime hours will help you manage the workload more efficiently, and take the necessary steps to ensure employee well-being.
For example, if you are experiencing a rise in sales, then you can expect that your employees will work overtime to deliver on the promises made to the consumers. However, this is a valuable indicator that you might want to analyze the effect this is having on your employees’ health, and either hire more team members, or adjust the workload to maintain productivity.
Employee turnover rate
And finally, the employee turnover rate is useful to many departments in your business, particularly HR because it provides valuable data on employee retention, productivity, as well as their happiness in the workplace. What’s more, this is a crucial metric that tells you when you can expect some of your employees to leave your company, so that you can either take preventative measures to make them stay, or to start marketing your business to other talent in your field and fill the gap before it appears.
Wrapping up
Office productivity is not just about measuring the time it takes to complete a task, nor is it just about monitoring revenue. Rather, measuring and improving office productivity is a complex task that involves a number of key performance indicators, so be sure to monitor these metrics to derive actionable data, and optimize every process to benefit the company and its employee collective.
Graphic Source: Freepik
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