Effective Ways to Track Your Team's Productivity

August 10, 2022 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Whether it is the classroom, kitchen table, or office space, no person enjoys when another hovers over whatever it is they are attempting to do. It is both unsettling and intrusive for any person to give heightened attention to one's personal space or activities. This tendency is especially true in the office. Employees cannot stand when their boss behaves more like a fly on their wall than a human being. Generally, this is not a matter of the employee attempting to hide something, rather, they are simply sensitive to their surroundings and desire respect.

However, from the boss's perspective, it is logical that they would want to keep tabs on exactly what the employee is doing and how they are performing. Why? For starters, if an employee is not performing well, that poses a variety of problems all of which could bring difficulty on the company. The Co-Founder of VergeSense, Dan Ryan, offered a different perspective on the matter, "If you can't measure something, you can't understand it. And if you can't understand it, you can't improve it."

Those interested in measuring a team's productivity without crossing a personal boundary are in luck as there are more than a few solutions to this problem.

It starts with technology implementation

Ryan Rottman, Co-Founder and CEO of OSDB provided a big picture solution, "Technology has grown so much in the last ten or so years that many of our traditional business practices are now antiquated, we just keep doing them out of habit. The biggest of these is the developments pertaining to the tracking of employee productivity. It'll take some time and learning to implement, but the outputs will be changing."

Measuring productivity without direct communication and observation is going to require more than just a couple of the technological innovations that have become widespread throughout the working world. Honestly, going this route may be a bit of a shakeup for any office. But bosses and managers alike will find great value in these additions. In many ways, the technology has evolved to the point where, if one can dream of tracking a specific metric related to their employees, chances are someone has already done it. It now falls to the company to make the most of it.

Simple time trackers

A prime example of this is the litany of options which will allow a company to stay highly informed on how each employee is spending their time. These can also go many steps further and provide insights on how much company-wide time is being dedicated to a specific task or project. Like with many of the tools discussed in this piece, the power of this software relies on the familiarity of the user operating it. If a boss simply wants an advanced way to handle the logging of working hours, there are more than enough options to choose from. Zach Goldstein, CEO of Public Rec "Gone are the days of walking around the office as a private investigator trying to find out what everyone is doing. Gone are the days of asking for a status report. Computer systems give you the ability to stay in the know without coming off as overbearing to your employees."

This appears to be the best of both worlds, corporately speaking - a boss can understand all they need to from afar while the employees maintain both a sense of productivity and freedom. But this only begins to scratch the surface of productivity trackers.

Planned to done ratios

There are many cases where knowing the amount of time employees are spending on a certain task will only get a company so far. When they do run into this issue, it might be time for companies to take the team tracking tools to the next level - analytics. The tried-and-true method of planned-to-done ratios is one of the largest stepping stones in the realm of tracking tools. Because not only does these statistics reveal how many and which tasks were assigned, it also details which were completed. In layman's terms, it is the task completion percentage. But before a company can make this software part of their routine, there must be a strong know-how of not only how to understand the data, but how to use it to its full potential.

Haim Medine, Creative Director of Mark Henry believes this approach can be groundbreaking if those using it know what they are doing, "A company's planned-to-done ratio can mean many things but if the one using it doesn't understand it, it means nothing. When used wisely, the planned-to-done ratio can give you enough information to positively impact the company on a regular basis."

Broaden your field of view

Regardless of which tools or software applications a company is using presently to track their team's productivity levels, having the correct mindset when doing so can make a world of difference. The issue with this is that over the course of time, and due to extended exposure to a specific topic or idea, humans tend to home in on a single approach to doing things. What does this mean practically speaking? Karim Hachem, VP of eCommerce at Maxine of Hollywood answered this, "A company can quickly become far too focused on either short- or long-term goals because of the digital systems they have put in place for themselves. As the boss, it is your responsibility to keep every team member's eye on the task at hand as well as the horizon and using more than one type of digital system is helpful."

Essentially, a company should look to diversify their employee tracking methods because if they fail to do so, teamwork and productivity can become scattered to the wind. Obviously, this is one of the last things any boss wants to do, so broadening the company's field of view seems especially beneficial.

All that has been discussed here may seem immense and eye-opening. In truth, what has been discussed here is a bit like a veil, hiding something greater and with far more potential 0 the ability to have a transparent understanding of what makes one's company tick. Hopefully, this writing serves as inspiration for taking concrete steps to make team productivity tracking happen. If not, one might not be as engaged in the day-to-day business as they think and should consider the words of productivity consultant, David Allen, "Use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them. You want to be adding value as you think about projects and people, not simply reminding yourself they exist."

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