One critical puzzle that Human resource management professionals worldwide often fail to solve is – “employee productivity.”
If you are one of the sufferers, we feel you. And if you want to know about the ins and outs of employee productivity and how to improve it, then worry no more!
You have clicked on the right link.
A quick look at the key points covered here:
- What is employee/workforce productivity?
- How can you measure workplace productivity?
- Efficiency Vs. Productivity
- Why is it crucial to ensure optimum productivity levels?
- Factors affecting productivity
- Ways to improve workplace productivity
- Things to keep in mind
- Consider ”SCALED”
First things first, what is Employee productivity in Human Resource Management?
Before going into details about why this matters, it is essential to understand what it means. Simply put, employee productivity is the assessment of an employee’s overall efficiency at work. Also known as workplace productivity, this is calculated based on the amount of output on a project versus the total amount of time spent on it. It is the value produced by individual employees within specified timeframes.
One can be labeled as productive if the quality of the work done by an employee can be justified by the time taken to complete it.
When it comes to productivity, there are countless numbers of policies taken up by Human Resource Management professionals across the globe. Still, somehow, most of them seem to fail. This happens mainly because of some flawed HR practices and the companies’ inability to read between the lines.
Measuring Workplace Productivity
Productivity is all about how well a company turns its labor into goods and services. It is the cumulative value a group of employees generate. So on a micro level, measuring productivity from the grassroots, and by that, I mean individual employees- is crucial to understand the overall productivity situation within an enterprise.
The more productive the employees are, the more value created for the organization. It is as simple as that.
In the world of Human Resource Management, there’s a widely accepted formula for measuring productivity.
Productivity = Units of Output/Units of Input
This age-old model fails us in most aspects. There’s more to it than just a formula. You need to look into the system as a whole and understand what elements of employee behavior affect workplace efficiency.
The ultimate assumption of workplace productivity comes down to this – “The amount an employee makes from wages and benefits should have to be less than the value he/she creates in a given period.”
Efficiency Vs. Productivity in Human Resource Management
Effectiveness is the efforts put in by an employee, whereas productivity is making sure the job gets done.
Employee productivity is a relative term and might come across differently to various Human Resource management practitioners.
For instance, let’s look into a situation where two employees in a company are engaged in a similar task – which is to clean five rooms each.
Employee X takes the job at hand seriously and takes more than 6 hours to do so, working tediously. He makes sure that all the floors are clean as a whistle. Whereas, Employee Y does the same within just 3 hours but leaves stained patches here and there. In this case, none of them succeeded in delivering what was expected of them and eventually ended up failing to be productive.
Why is it crucial in Human Resource mANAGEMENT to ensure high productivity levels?
A hard-working and motivated employee can motivate others in the office. A company can only offer incentives to the employees only if the revenue increases. Employees help in increasing revenue and facilitating growth by being productive.
For every company, hiring an employee is an investment. It is one of the most important investments for a company. The only way this investment is fruitful is if the employee is productive. Human resource management professionals should strive to maximize both productivity and effectiveness to get the best return on investment in their employees.
Factors affecting productivity
- Ineffective Work Environment
- Poor Communication
- Low Engagement
- Misallocation of resources
- Lack of motivation
1) Ineffective Work Environment
By this, we mean a non-functioning work environment which is never desired. To stay functional and practical, a workplace should always be evolving with time. There will be things like technological changes and organizational process overhauls. Still, an ideal team should always have the capability to adapt to any such changes swiftly and actively.
If the units do not function properly, the whole spine of the company breaks down. When work moves at a slow pace, days become months and months become years. The company loses valuable amounts of time, money, and, ultimately – excellent resources due to nagging ineffectiveness in the workplace.
A work culture that is highly toxic, bullying, discriminatory, and energy-draining, cannot ensure even the minimum levels of productivity.
2) Poor Communication
Communication is vital.
Poor communication or miscommunication across or among the teams always end badly.
To manage highly productive teams, the essential aspect that must be ensured is efficient communication. If every piece does not work together, an organization can hardly function. In cannot be stressed enough how bad communication deliver killing blows to companies.
3) Low Engagement
When there is a lack of engagement, employees tend to feel they don’t have a purpose in the process. Low engagement can happen because of a lot of reasons:
- lack of proper guidance from the manager
- Inability to socialize with team-mates
- Failure to understand and not connecting with the company’s mission and visions
- Lack of management feedback
- Incomplete onboarding and training, and so many more!
The most widely accepted notion within the Human Resource Management industry is that employees leave a company for more money. Factually, that is not the case at all.
(stats: officevibe)
4) Faulty recruitment, Resource Misallocation
Misallocation of resources happens when resources are not put to their most efficient or effective use. This might be a result of faulty or hurried recruitment, lack of a proper onboarding framework, and even an adequate monitoring policy. This leads to increased levels of unproductive work in the office.
5) Lack of Motivation
Another major issue faced by HR teams across industries is the lack of motivation among employees. If there’s no spark among the people calling the shots, the system breaks down like a house of cards.
We don’t enjoy what we do if we don’t believe in what we are doing
It is mostly the job of the employer to garner and facilitate motivation across the office. Bad leadership leads to decreased motivation and, in turn, causes projects to fail miserably.
Ideal Human Resource Management: How you can improve workplace productivity
1) Better recruitment & onboarding
In human resource management, Everything starts with recruitment. If the recruitment process is not perfect, everything onward just goes downhill. Wrong recruitment will only lead to waste of time accounting for both parties, not to mention the wastage of money. Recruiting should never be hurried, and special importance should be given towards this.
It does not end there with just the recruitment. A good quality onboarding is essential to make sure that your top-notch recruits are well accustomed with the office environment and processes. It also helps to internalize company hierarchies and practices – which enables smoother communications across the board.
2) Smooth internal communication
Communication should always be free-flowing. Ensuring that the internal communication between coworkers is still on point and uninterrupted is key to achieving a productive workplace.
Adding to that, if people don’t get the correct information, they will fail to be productive. Therefore, avoiding the spread of misinformation is as vital as ensuring a smooth communication system within your organization.
Here’s how you can effectively improve your internal communication: by organizing better meaningful meetings regularly where everyone will be able to share thoughts, promote open dialogue, cut out unnecessary hierarchies that become bottlenecks.
3) Inspiring employees
The prime reason for your employees being unproductive? Because they’re not inspired.
The management’s role is to inspire their people through what they do and what they stand for. One way to inspire your employees is to share and promote your organization’s goals and visions.
It is also the leadership’s responsibility to motivate everyone to internalize and practice company values every day. If you feel like you are working for something significant, your work finds so much more purpose.
4) Positioning key players in key roles
Identifying vital resources is important as you would not want someone good at something to be assigned to some other tasks. Find out what your most business-critical positions are and try to fill them up with the A-players on your team. Help people work on tasks that align with your strengths.
5) Inclusive learning & knowledge sharing
Motivate inclusive learning. Inspire an environment where everyone is open to sharing knowledge and cultivating an open-minded workspace. Let your employees work on their ideas. Let them educate themselves along the way and share the experience among colleagues. This effectively ensures that employees keep engaged and highly productive.
6) Interactive training sessions
Trainings were always meant to be fun. But most of the companies these days take trainings as just formalities and not interactive ways to promote a healthy and growing work environment. On the brighter side, many progressive companies are introducing more effective methods of employee training.
Modern human resource management departments conduct training through e-learning. Employees train themselves on the go, and HR managers can also evaluate them quickly and effectively.
7) Ensure a happy workplace
It’s a well-known fact that happy is way more productive than those who don’t enjoy what they’re doing. As 21st century leaders, you should make employee happiness a priority and create a happy workplace where everyone takes pride in their roles. Letting people know from time to time how valuable their work is, is another way of encouraging a pleasant work environment.
Key points to consider
Consider making life easier for your employees with less paperwork and simple processes. Complex processes in an organization hurts the overall productivity of the firm. Automating paperwork reduces employee stress significantly, boosting on-job productivity.
Digital files that are kept online can easily be found and accessed at any time of the day as they are kept online. Whereas paper files are hard to store, maintain, and are easily lost or damaged.
An organized and clean office maximizes employee’s working time and improves workplace motivation.
And as mentioned earlier, introducing modern ways of employee evaluation and training in the form of online training platforms help a lot in your quest to find optimum productivity.
If you’re still not familiar with the term employee self-service, then it’s high time to be!
Employee self-service is a relatively new ideology when it comes to human resource management- which ‘empowers’ your people rather than ‘controlling them.’ People get to update and manage their information, apply for leaves, send requisitions, and get approvals on the go.
If you ever had nagging questions about productivity and wasn’t sure about how to improve it in your office, now you know.
The bottom line is, if you want to reduce employee turnover rates, cut high costs, save valuable human-hours and keep a sustainable, productive work environment, you should consider automating your manual human resource management processes and practices.
Automation frees up enough time for you and your team to do better quality work in less time – that’s the necessary foundation of productivity.
TIME tO bE ‘SCALED’ uP!
Building and nurturing a friendly environment with the right processes and principles is the cornerstone of developing a productive workforce. That’s why it never hurts to spend time and money in improving your human resource management practices, as when your company has a productive workforce, only the sky can be the limit.
Southtech’s SCALED is the leading HR software in Bangladesh, successfully serving large banks and multinationals since the beginning of the millennium.
SCALED takes a holistic approach in digitizing your regular business processes – enabling an active and comfortable experience for your skilled workforce. Eliminate all your unnecessary paper costs and hassles, reduce production times drastically, and lead your teams to ultimate productivity!
If you are still confused about how to properly utilize your team’s work hours, and enable a functioning work environment, feel free to get in touch with us!
Our experts will be more than happy to guide you in the process of reengineering your HR with smart digital transformation!
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