*High productivity in the workplace is one of the most in-demand business goals among big and small companies alike. Getting your employees to do more work for the less amount of time without burning out at the same time is pretty much the definition of performance improvement strategy regardless of which industry you operate in.
But how can you achieve this? You’ve probably heard something down the lines of ‘If you can measure it, you can improve it’ about a thousand times so far. So, can you measure productivity? Because if you can, that’s one step closer to being able to improve it.
In this article, we’ll introduce employee monitoring software as a tool that can help you quantify your employees’ workplace productivity. Later, we’ll also see how you can use these insights and reports to make improvements to the workforce efficiency.
Using Employee Monitoring Software to Measure Productivity
First of all, let’s explain what employee monitoring software is and how it works. So, it’s basically a system that you install on all your corporate computers and it lets you track all digital activities on your manager dashboard. The features and capabilities depend on the software that you get, but the basic functionality includes detecting which apps your employees use and for how long. A part of this is an internet monitor feature that works by tracking which websites are visited.
Now, what does this have to do with productivity? We need to explain a couple more functionalities in order to see what productivity measurements are based on. First, employee monitoring software can also detect whether employees are using their computers or not at any given time, and so the ratio of active to idle time can be easily calculated. And secondly, every time any of your employees opens an app that they’ve never used before, you’re prompted to categorize it as ‘productive’, ‘unproductive’ or ‘neutral’ for that employee or their department.
Based on all of this, productivity in the context of employee tracking software is usually defined as the percentage of time used on productive apps out of the total active time spent on the computer. This is calculated automatically and for every employee individually, but the stats can be aggregated on a team or even company level.
This is pretty handy, but it’s not the end. This system is just the basis for many productivity reports that PC monitoring software can provide. We’ll name just a few.
For instance, you can get productivity trends, which show the fluctuation of productivity levels compared to the previous period – whether it has increased or decreased and by how much. Then, you get pretty handy timelines which show productivity levels over the entire work day so that you can see when each employee is most or least productive. Similarly, you can take a look at team biorhythm, which shows how productivity rises and falls during the day for any specific team or department.
How to Use This Data to Increase Productivity
All of these useful data and reports provided by employee monitoring software wouldn’t be so helpful if they didn’t present an opportunity to come up with actionable strategies for improving your results.
For one, you can pinpoint exactly which individuals and teams need improvement. Then, you can analyze why this is so by looking at the apps used. Maybe the problem is in visiting social media or news websites a bit too often, which is a pattern very easily discovered by network monitoring software. Then you can work on curbing the issue either by talking to your employees or some more drastic measures like blocking the distracting websites entirely.
Employee monitoring software also makes it incredibly easy to track your employees’ productivity progress. This is an amazing way to see whether your strategies are working or not. According to this data, you’re able to adjust your course of action immediately when you spot the problem and thus save a lot of time by abandoning strategies that aren’t working.
Conclusion
Measuring productivity is the first step towards improving it, and employee tracking software can help you a great deal in this. Once you get the data, all you have to do is analyze it carefully and work on solving the productivity issues that you discover. Before long, you’ll have a team that’s more productive and efficient than ever.
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