What is Productivity in the Workplace?

When it comes to being productive at work, what does it really mean? Though the answer itself is simple, the way to get there requires a little work. Workplace productivity is the value each individual employee and their team bring to the success of the overall business.

Fostering productivity at work is an essential part of business success, but not only because it drives business outcomes—it also has a positive impact on employees and allows them to progress toward their full potential. And when that happens, you’re more likely to retain engaged employees.

It comes as no surprise that productivity is important. In this article, we’ll give you tips to measure and boost your worker productivity.

CHECK OUT: From Onboarding to Productivity: How to Make Your New Hires Successful

Ways to Measure Productivity

To understand the value your employees are bringing and how they impact the bottom line, it’s important to start tracking certain metrics. This can ensure your workforce is as optimized as possible and highlight any areas for improvement.

A study by Gallup found that 51% of employees are disengaged, meaning that they make little effort at work and aren’t focused on high-quality output. Of course, you don’t want your employees to become part of that statistic—and that starts by measuring current engagement and productivity.

Productivity might be hard to define, but the most relevant output to think about is value. Your worker productivity is equivalent to the value of work divided by the employee’s time and effort put into it.

Based on those metrics, you may want to boost your staff productivity—but we’ll get into how to improve productivity later.

Time Tracking

Something simple such as having employees provide a time sheet with a list of everything they’ve worked on that week, plus time spent on each task, can encourage accountability without micromanagement.

However, when you think about the productivity of your employees, it’s important to focus on results, not time spent on the computer. Though this can help you gauge how much time employees spend on certain tasks, expecting a full day of productivity is just not realistic. If the output is where you need it to be, that’s what matters in the end.

Revenue

Profitability is essential in keeping your organization successful, and tracking how much revenue is generated per employee can show where your company stands. To calculate, just divide total revenue by total number of employees.

This calculation helps measure which employees contribute to the bottom line, which will help you determine where to focus your productivity improvement efforts.

Profit

You can measure employee productivity and efficiency by looking at your company’s profit. When your employees are hitting their performance goals and delivering results, the growth of your company should reflect this.

This metric highlights worker productivity more than measuring the overall time spent busy because productivity isn’t just how much time is spent completing tasks—it’s about how your employees contribute to and create impacts for the company.

Factors Affecting Worker Productivity

In order to start increasing productivity at work, it’s important to first understand what factors affect employee productivity. These factors are some of the most common aspects that companies choose to enhance to help their employees stay engaged and motivated.

Work Environment

An employee’s work environment can definitely impact their well-being and performance. Whether this is management styles, company values and culture, communication styles, leadership, or trust in the workplace—all of these are important contributions to the overall work environment.

By investing in improving each of these areas, your team and organization as a whole can boost productivity and avoid fostering a toxic work environment. This will make your employees feel more confident in where they stand by implementing a culture of communication, empathy, and vulnerability.

Growth Opportunities

Many employees find motivation in career growth and professional development opportunities. By giving them opportunities to be challenged or work on interesting projects, workers will become more engaged in business outcomes.

It’s important to show your employees that their work is valued and reward them for their impact on the team. This will help build momentum and increase productivity.

In one of our webinars, Strategic Culture Advisor Alysun Hudepohl said she believes it’s important to “focus more on giving them the understanding and the skills, the training that they need, so that they can be effective in their daily roles and responsibilities.”

Opportunities to Socialize

As human beings, we’re very social creatures. Even though there are employees who prefer to work remotely or avoid after-work events, it’s still important to create opportunities for employees to connect—whether that is in person or virtually.

Socialization helps build trust, increase creativity, and boost collaboration across teams. These events can be purely social or work-related team-building exercises.

Manager and Peer Feedback

Receiving healthy feedback from supervisors helps employees thrive and grow. To keep your employees engaged with the workplace. It’s important to recognize their efforts and provide regular check-ins with your team.

This allows employees to give any feedback and also receive any notes on where they have room for growth. Fostering transparency through open and honest communication between employees and their leaders helps boost productivity at work.

Clear Expectations

Setting and clearly communicating expectations before starting a project can save teams lots of time, especially when dealing with new hires. Investing this time upfront often reduces the time needed for revisions down the road.

According to our Consultant Engagement Regional Manager Nicole Orie, you must clearly define “the expectations behind the task or the project that your new hire is going to have as well because they might not know how long things are supposed to take in your company.”

By clearly defining expectations early on, employees will become productive and more confident in their roles at a much faster rate.

How to Improve Productivity at Work

Now that we’ve gone over what productivity is and what metrics will help determine your worker productivity, let’s get into what’s next—how to improve productivity at work.

When it comes to increasing productivity at work, the process should actually start before a new hire’s first day. Effective onboarding programs can set the scene for worker productivity—77% of employees who had formal onboarding hit their first performance goal.

As our Consultant Engagement Lead Rebecca Farno mentions, employers should use “onboarding as an enablement tool to make sure your folks have the opportunity to culturally integrate as well as understand exactly what’s expected of them.”

Of course, you want to strike a healthy balance—though you want you workers to be productive and successful, it’s important to make sure these expectations don’t lead to employee burnout.

To develop a more productive team, focus on any previously listed factors that could use improvement (hint: everything can always be improved upon). Here are some tips that managers and leaders can follow to boost worker productivity:

Invest in your team’s well-being by offering coaching, mental health days, or volunteer days
Create paths for employee growth and development
Provide incentives and reward employees for good contributions
Communicate expectations clearly and early on
Avoid micromanaging and instead give your team the space they need to work productively
Establish open and honest communication through feedback loops for each employee
Understand your team’s individual skillsets and delegate tasks based on this knowledge

The Link Between Staff Productivity and Retention

There are many benefits to increasing productivity at work, such as increased efficiency, improved individual and company performance, and better employee well-being. By fostering a company culture where productivity flows naturally, you may end up improving employee retention as a side effect.

Many of the factors affecting worker productivity are also factors that influence an employee’s decision to seek work elsewhere. Increasing productivity through investing in these improvements will also lead to more employee satisfaction and therefore, greater retention.

Let Insight Global Help

If you’re looking for help overhauling company culture and improving worker productivity, our Compass Culture Consulting division can help you along this journey. Or maybe you’ve done the work to boost productivity and are now looking for new employees—Insight Global can help you there too!

Contact us today to connect with our hiring partners. With over 20 years of experience, we’re experts at finding top talent when you need it.