Wondering what can a business do to improve its productivity while juggling its goals to increase annual profits, improve employee engagement, and reach monthly objectives? That’s quite a challenge.

And many businesses are failing at it, resulting in negative outcomes such as employee disengagement and poor revenues. Among these, employee disengagement alone results in global losses worth $8.8 trillion.

You probably don’t want to be one of those businesses that are reporting losses due to declining productivity. Fortunately, there are actionable best practices that can help you assess this important metric and improve it.

Keep reading to understand workplace productivity better and why you must monitor it. You’ll also discover simple strategies to increase productivity so you can achieve your other goals with greater ease.

What Is Productivity and Why Does It Matter?

Productivity measures the efficiency of individuals or systems in converting inputs into valuable outputs, essential in evaluating business performance.

It signifies how effectively a company utilizes its resources, including labor and materials, to produce goods and services, directly influencing profitability and competitiveness.

Why Should You Measure Workplace Productivity?

Measuring workplace productivity is a great way to evaluate the efficiency of a company’s operations and employees. The most important reason for measuring it is to increase productivity. But there are other crucial reasons to measure productivity that can’t be ignored. Here are three of them:

  • It simplifies decision-making regarding operational changes, resource allocation, capital investments, etc.

  • It helps companies evaluate whether they can deliver on a client request.

  • It helps managers gauge which employees can lead a project or take on more responsibilities.

Before we try to answer, “What can a business do to improve its productivity?,” let’s learn how to measure it.

Measuring and Monitoring Workplace Productivity

We calculate productivity using this simple formula:

Here, output can refer to sales revenue, products/services delivered, etc. Input encompasses factors that influence those results such as resources dedicated to a project, time spent on tasks, etc.

However, this formula cannot be used in all instances. Here are examples of situations where you may need to measure productivity differently.

Measuring the Goals Met

If you’re measuring goals met, start by calculating the number of goals you want employees to meet during a given period. Then, calculate the number of goals realized during the same period and compare the two.

Highly productive teams will meet all their goals and may even exceed them.

Measuring the Amount of Profit Made

For measuring workplace productivity using profits, use your historical data to set benchmarks for annual profits in the coming year. Adjust these benchmarks based on changes you’ll be making to your workforce, workplace, equipment, and operations.

Then, compare the numbers to profits made.

The profits made by a productive team will often match or exceed the benchmarks.

However, there may be other factors to take into consideration that have nothing to do with productivity.

Measuring the Amount of Work Completed

If you’re measuring workplace productivity by factoring in the amount of work completed, decide how much work your team needs to complete during a fixed period. Then, compare the number to the work that was actually performed during the timeframe.

Teams with high productivity will complete the set number of tasks or even finish more tasks than expected.

Measuring the Quality of Work Completed

When measuring the quality of work, start by deciding on a set of parameters that reflect the successful delivery of a project. For example, meeting all client requirements, ensuring client satisfaction, etc.

After every project is completed and delivered, check how many of those parameters were met.

Teams that accomplish several projects while meeting those parameters are highly productive.

Measuring the Time Spent on a Task

To measure the time spent on a task, set estimates for the time required to finish it. Then, compare the number of hours actually spent on the task against those estimates.

If your team finishes its projects on time or before the deadline, your productivity is quite high.

8 Productivity-Boosting Strategies for the Workplace

These simple productivity strategies can be implemented by teams of any size and from any industry.

Reduce Distractions and Time-Wasting Activities

Minimize distractions at the workplace and reduce time-wasting activities such as unnecessary meetings on your employees’ schedules. Remove distracting physical installations from the workplace. Encourage socialization during meal time or breaks and not during work hours. Create a workplace culture where employees respect each other’s heads-down time or blackout periods.

Gather employee feedback regularly regarding which practices they find distracting, time-consuming, or unnecessary.

Emphasize Employee Training

Provide your employees with sufficient training to help them get accustomed to the workplace, its culture, and the work itself. This will ensure they’re prepared to tackle tasks with a minimum of obstacles.

Optimize Internal Communication

Ensure communication at your workplace is accurate and reaches the right employees without delay. Set up clear lines of communication to ensure everyone can access information from their subordinates and higher-ups.

For teams that collaborate often, you want to optimize connectivity, feedback loops, and performance reviews to enhance teamwork.

Stop Micromanagement

Constant micromanagement leads to low employee morale and a loss of productivity.

Avoid it by making your expectations clear and giving employees more autonomy over their tasks and schedule.

Use SMART Goals

Make sure your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) so employees understand what’s expected of them. This helps them stay on track and enables you to review progress easily.

Use Reminders

Reduce your employees’ mental burden by encouraging them to set reminders and alerts for meetings, events, and other responsibilities. By doing so, they can focus more on the tasks at hand while receiving timely reminders for their other obligations.

Discourage Multitasking

Multitasking can overwhelm employees, possibly resulting in poor-quality work and missed deadlines.

Make sure you’re setting realistic expectations for your employees and actively discouraging multitasking. Avoid delegating tasks by role and title. Instead, assign tasks to employees who have the bandwidth and can deliver excellent results.

Tackle Burnout and Fatigue

Burnout and fatigue can lead to poor health, lack of motivation, and procrastination. Ultimately, it can make employees feel disengaged at work, prompting them to take frequent leaves.

Tackle these issues by encouraging employees to take the breaks and vacations they’ve earned.

Improve Productivity With ControTask

What can a business do to improve its productivity? As you can see, employee monitoring is a key priority for any productivity-oriented organization. While management needs to avoid micromanaging, it must also have a way of enforcing accountability.

For companies that want to track productivity while encouraging autonomy, ControTask is the answer. ControTask is employee monitoring software with a multitude of features that allow you to monitor several valuable productivity metrics.

Monitor local and remote teams, see how many hours employees spend on tasks, eliminate time-wasting apps and sites, learn which employees are overworked, and much more.

With a tool like ControTask in your arsenal, you can manage productivity with accurate and timely information. Explore our different plans or call us at 1 (855) 8CO-NTRO to learn more.