Sunday, May 30, 2021

How to Measure Productivity When Working from Home

 

While remote working allows organizations to reduce overhead costs to a certain extent, With the COVID-19 health crisis, transitioning to remote working is the default option for most organizations around the world.
 
Since organization employees are no longer in the operate in the office premises, many organizations are finding different ways to measure their productivity. Following ways can be used to measure the productivity of employees who are remote working. 

Weekly Sprint (Task) Completion Rate

Measurement: Amount of work accomplished in a week

Criteria: Compare rates between work completed before and after work from home directive in a given sprint cycle.

Remote work productivity can also be measured by the tasks that any individual completes in a week. This can be done at a time-boxed interval assigned for completing a specific task.

Organizations can also use productivity apps to assign tasks, prioritize them, and monitor workflow. These tools help in measuring the speed of work completion, and by identifying performance gaps of work completed in physical workplace vs. work completed as remote work.

When it comes to how employee productivity is measured when working from home, accounting for the number of tasks completed vs. unconcluded tasks, and the quality of work completed through weekly audits by appointed peer review teams.


Schedule Variance

Metric: Understand the current situation of projects it is running behind or ahead of the scheduled time and budget constraints.

Formula: Delta of planned budget and actual cost for work completed.

Schedule variance is a productivity measurement for managers in an organization. This measures the difference between the planned schedule and the actual schedule.

Ideally, the output value of schedule variance should always be positive to ensure that the allocated tasks are running ahead or within schedule. When working from home, schedule variance should be calculated on completion of pre-planned milestones. And, if negative outputs are identified, amendments to remote working teams will be applied accordingly.

 

180-Degree Feedback

Metric: Gathering anonymous feedbacks from other employees regarding their colleagues.

Taking feedback from colleagues on their team individuals is an effective way to understand how they contribute to business continuity during COVID-19.

The team members that are working towards a common goal know who is putting in how much effort. This is achieved by sending surveys to individuals to rate their peers on various performance measuring parameters commonly using either rating scales or checklist.

This helps in understanding loopholes in performance while remote working in organizations.

To understand how to measure productivity when working from home, focus on the following parameters:



This also helps in holding employees accountable over teams or departments. And, when organizations engrave accountability in the work culture, people will automatically track the time spent on the assigned tasks.

 

Lead To Win Conversion Rate.

Metric: Percentage of potential business leads that gets converted into organization customers

Formula: Divide total business lead follow-up by awarded projects into 100.

The remote working trend is the way forward for most businesses due to the COVID-19 outbreak that led to the lockdowns globally. The chain of events further led to an economic downturn that impacted organizations and its workforce around the world with fewer business leads and fewer investment opportunities.

Businesses need to keep a keen watch for new business opportunities. This can be achieved by setting feasible targets for sales and marketing teams or departments during challenging times and resuming to standard targets once the pandemic situation out of the current critical state.

Keeping a close watch on how the incoming business leads are being nurtured. This can be done by analyzing the frequency of emails sent, the scale of marketing and sales efforts, the response rates,.


Customer Satisfaction Rate

Metric: Measure the quality of products and services offered by the organization.

Formula: Divide positive responses by the total responses received from customers and multiply it by 100.

The customer satisfaction metric is a data-driven result based on scores received from customer surveys. This captures unbiased responses from customers that is used to analyze the quality of products and services provided by the organization while working remotely, This can be achieved by sending monthly surveys to customers.

This survey can comprise performance parameters where the organization's customers can rate the satisfaction level for services and products consumed by them. If the rating is lower than what it was before facilitating remote work, the organization needs to put more focus on corrective measures.




References

How to Measure Productivity When Working from Home (no date). 
Available at: https://www.netsolutions.com/insights/how-to-measure-productivity-when-working-from-home/ (Accessed: 30 May 2021).

How to measure productivity of remote employees working from home (no date). 
Available at: https://www.hivedesk.com/blog/work-from-home-remote-employee-productivity/ (Accessed: 30 May 2021).

How To Measure Remote Employee Productivity (Metrics, Tips, Tools) (no date). Available at: https://biz30.timedoctor.com/measure-productivity-employees-working-from-home/ (Accessed: 30 May 2021).



5 comments:

  1. This is an appropriate topic for present situation with covid. in the Present situation companies temptation to introduce the Work from home concept. but the difficulty is how they monitor the performance. it's hard to measure with the big number of employees. so It's become one of the major responsible for HRM.

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  2. Organizations today are responding to a new normal, with many knowledge workers now unexpectedly working remotely full time. The nature of this transition has sparked a major question: How do we best measure productivity in knowledge workers, and given those impacts, what is the future of mobile workforces? The debate over the role of physical presence in productivity has been an important factor in shaping the debate around flexible working. The idea that working from home is more productive than being in a physical location has been the subject of debate.
    HRM must implementing and Setting up SMART KPIs for Remote Work: Self-Discipline and Effective Communication. Self-discipline and communication effectiveness are two KPIs that help HR teams assess employee productivity and performance when working remotely. Both are also "SMART" objectives, which means they are specific, measurable, achievable, relatable and timely. By investing in these areas, HRM's can position their companies for long-term success.

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  3. At the most basic level, productivity is a measure of output per unit of time. You can add more business-oriented measures like customer satisfaction level, increase in sales or increase in website visitors to your productivity measure.

    So the first step in measuring productivity is to create a policy that clearly lays out how you will do it. It will help you put in place right tools and process.

    The employees will know exactly how you will measure them. This transparency will build trust with employees and help them prioritize their work.

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  4. Tracking time is essential to measuring employee productivity.for that company can use An online time tracking software that automatically tracks how much time employees spend on work. also, Tracking time serves and Estimate completion time for each task help to improve employee productivity.

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  5. COVID-19 has left almost every business across the globe with Hobson’s choice - remote work. While the concept is new for some and tried-and-tested for others, the myth around low productivity when working from home prevails. But, if you put the right productivity metrics in place, the loopholes can be identified, and remote work can be streamlined. Still, organizations need to learn how to measure productivity. That’s why HR should implement proper key performance indicators to measure productivity according to this situation.

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