Many times, we often hear the phrase ‘Do the Impossible!’ But is it beneficial to execute a backbreaking work to secure and measure productivity effectively? Whether you manage a huge enterprise or a startup, ideally, reaching goals is an intrinsic part of growth. We are going to share with you some of our best tips to measure productivity. Whether monitoring in-house or remote staff, having clear KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) will help move the needle of your business.

Focusing on the tasks that will create the impact can also be difficult unless you set the standard. Therefore, it is important to clearly communicate those goals and standards to your team and regularly monitor them.

For a business focused on developing growth, here are 3 elements to effectively measure productivity:

The Clock Isn’t Always the Basis:

 Time well spent is more important than the volume of time for certain tasks. While certainly, time management is a very important skill, some tasks clearly require mental processing. These types of task cannot be rushed as if they are, the outcome will not be optimal. Understanding what the best outcome is for the time spent, is a much better measurement of productivity than breaking down the task into a minute by minute increments. Judge the results of the labor and not the amount of time spent.

 The good old 80/20 rule applies in every area of life but is very important in business. Approximately 20% of what you do impacts 80% of your end result. Stephen Covey talks about spending time in the Important/Non-Urgent category of tasks. It is important to recognize this while measuring your productiveness. For example, if 20% of what you do is training people, establishing a good connection to the team, and sharing best practices, you’ll have the chance to influence them towards success by multiplying the values and the productivity of the business. It also allows you and your staff to have an approach of working on things that have the highest return on their investment of time. Busy does not equal production in most cases.

Keep Track of Everything:

 By tracking the time spent and the results of the day, it allows each of us to make sure we are spending our time wisely. Each day our virtual staff provide us with a written report that helps us track their performance and allows us to see how productive they have been each day. Are they accomplishing the objectives?

 KPIs need to be reviewed regularly. They need to reflect the overall goals of the position. For our business, we review then at least quarterly since the economic environment changes fairly rapidly.

Achieving your business goals is the primary objective. Human capital is one of your largest investment of resources. It is important to make sure that you have policies and procedures in place to measure the effectiveness of you and your team.

 If you have ever wondered how we run 7 businesses while maintaining our sanity – schedule a call to see if we can help you get out of the weeds and have more of a life. Cheers!