With a large chunk of the workforce working remotely during COVID-19, the traditional methods of measuring employee productivity are no longer applicable. The typical workday for employees is no longer the same as before the pandemic. Managers can no longer micromanage the day to day tasks of employees.
The time is ripe to consider and implement new metrics to judge employee productivity. These metrics will allow managers, as well as employees, track their performance, and make the necessary tweaks.
Here are a few metrics we think might be a good starting point to help managers
- Work Time
While this metric is self-explanatory, managers do need to pay attention to the average time employees spend working. If you witness an unexpected surge in the working hours, your employees might be finding it difficult to strike a work-life balance while working remotely. They might be overburdened with work, which could lead to burnout.
On the contrary, if your employees are spending a lower than expected time working, they may not enough work and might need more guidance. Advanced employee timesheet appliances such as TimeDoctor or Harvest could help you get an accurate idea of your employees’ work time.
- Project Completion Deadlines
Managers should monitor how efficiently their remote team is working and whether they are able to meet their project deadlines. Project management tools such as Asana, Basecamp, or Trello could help you delegate tasks and set deadlines. If your team is unable to meet team deadlines or is facing bottlenecks, you might need to reevaluate if the deadlines are too small or if your workflow is inefficient.
- Employee Turnover Rate
For an organization to run smoothly, it is essential to retain your top talent. When an employee leaves, there is a drop in productivity as well as an added cost of hiring and training new employees.
Choose a period of time and divide the number of employees who have left by the total number of active employees to obtain the figure of employee attrition within your organization. If that number is considerably high, your organization is going to see a disruption in your operations as well as a drop in productivity.
Therefore it is important to understand what is leading to the increased rates in employee attrition and resolve the issue before it negatively impacts the business.
- Employee Satisfaction
A major factor behind employee attrition is low employee satisfaction. When working from an office, it is easier to gauge employee satisfaction by speaking to your team members and by the atmosphere at work. When your entire team is working remotely, communication is one of the first things to get impacted making it difficult to gauge dissatisfaction if any.
Conducting employee surveys could help your workers communicate their thoughts, feelings, and fears. Listening to and responding to your team’s voices can help them feel valued and cared for. Another important thing would be to schedule one on ones with your employees when possible so that they get opportunities to voice their opinions.
- Customer Satisfaction
While most metrics mentioned above are quantitative, customer satisfaction is more of a qualitative metric. Customer satisfaction is one of the best markers to understand if your team is doing their work well because it is the customers who decide the success of any business. A customer satisfaction survey created in programs such as Survey Monkey or Zendesk can be a great way to understand what your team is doing right and what they need to be working on.
There is really no one particular metric or solution that can help you with employee productivity. Every business comes with its own set of unique challenges and the kind of metrics they can employ might therefore differ from the list above. However, the above list can give you a general idea of how to gauge employee productivity and support your employees during this pandemic.
