How to Build an Effective Productivity Management System

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When you run a business or manage a large group of people, you need to pay attention to productivity.

In simple terms, productivity is the output you receive per each unit of input. Your input is usually related to time, so your productivity is often calculated by the hour. In the world of operations management, productivity is also used to gauge how well available resources are employed. The field of productivity management has grown up around the need to keep tabs on productivity.

A productivity management system outlines multiple factors. These can include the criteria used for measuring productivity, and the goals of the business broken down into factors.

It is necessary to have a system in place that enables you to monitor and reward workers who give the best performance and have worked the most efficiently so that you can keep hold of top talent. This will help you maximise gains and help employees to thrive and develop so that they can take on additional responsibilities.

Soon, we will find out why productivity is important and look at the role of productivity management today, in the ever-changing world of work. First, though, let’s define the term.

What is Productivity Management?

As the world of work continually evolves, people are finding it harder than ever to increase their productivity, at a time when doing so is often critical to your success. Luckily, productivity management can help.

Productivity management is an organisational framework that helps both teams and individuals boost their efficiency. Managers and leaders use development, communication strategies, and incentives to improve employee performance and increase productivity.

Suppose you build an effective productivity management system. You can use it to maximise gains for the business, and indirectly influence the outcomes by retaining the best talent and giving them opportunities to develop their skill set.

Make sure you have a good productivity management system in place because poor productivity management can be one of the main reasons for poor or uninspiring employee performance.

How Management Impacts Productivity

Managers can make a huge difference to whether a business realises its goals and is productive or not. Good management can increase growth, market value, and the chances of a business weathering a recession.

One study suggests that management accounts for as much as 70% of the difference in how engaged employees are. A good manager will understand how skilled each member of a team is and have a fair grasp of their strengths and weaknesses. They will work with people to ensure that each gives the best possible performance and produces good results. They will also offer support when and where necessary.

It’s time to talk about how vital productivity is.

Why is Productivity Important?

If you are highly productive, you can achieve your personal and professional goals. In a company, maintaining high levels of productivity boosts morale, makes for a better work environment and pushes people to excel.

When companies thrive, in part because of increased employee productivity, they can offer better incentives.

These may include:

• Better pay.
• Attractive bonuses.
• Better health insurance.
• More paid time off.

Incentives like these encourage people and motivate them to work harder and advance their careers. In turn, the business continues to flourish.

Therefore, managers and business leaders must understand how crucial productivity is to business if they want to enjoy the taste of success.

Do We Need Productivity Management?

 Given that a 2020 study into working from home found that levels of productivity either remained stable or increased when people worked remotely for six months, do we even need good productivity management?

The short answer is yes because it can boost productivity even more and give rise to benefits such as:

• Producing better quality products and services.
• Reduced costs for overheads.
• Helping the business prosper.
• Decreased cost of production thanks to more efficient use of resources.
• More profits to share with stakeholders.

The study found that those who had been encouraged and supported by their managers in remote meetings were likely to be more productive than those that were not.

So, now we’ve established that it’s useful to have a productivity management system to help enhance our efficiency, let’s go through how best to build one.

How to Build an Effective Productivity Management System

You need to employ tact when creating an effective productivity management system if you want to help your team reach their potential, meet their goals, and level up their productivity. It’s all about creating opportunities for people to make mistakes, learn and grow as they work together to achieve a shared goal.

Your system should:

• Map work in accordance with team and business goals.
• Make sure the ways you measure productivity are understandable and transparent.
• Make it possible for employees to understand how their work relates to business goals, so that they can assess their own performance.
• Make it clear how each goal influences productivity, and how important each goal is to the business or your own work and career growth.

You must get an accurate idea of your team’s efforts if you want to give them clear responsibilities and helpful advice on how to become more productive. You need to consider factors aside from time and effort to do this.

Here are our top tips for creating a productivity management system.

Focus on quality

Align employees’ work with chosen performance metrics so that you have a clear way to examine the quality of their work.

Pay attention to insights gained from failures as well as successes

If something doesn’t work out, you and your team can still use insights you may gain from it to improve your chances of succeeding as you forge ahead. Doing this can lead to future innovations and help your team accomplish its goals.

Consider how projects and goals impact the business

It’s common for some projects to have no specific metrics. Nevertheless, such projects can produce results that affect the business. Intangible results can include things like:

• An improvement in employee engagement.
• Improving team cohesion and helping improve teammates’ productivity.
• Boosting brand recognition and public awareness of the company.

Note the kinds of mistakes people make

We all know that making errors can slow progress. Instead of judging others for those errors, however, you should look at the reasons why the mistakes happened. Did an employee make mistakes as a result of carelessness or did they have to figure out how to deal with a complex task and subsequently found themselves unsure how to proceed?

If errors were not made because of carelessness, it may be more productive to go through the decision-making process with your team to come up with ideas on how to avoid a similar situation occurring in the future.

Consider how each employee works

 How independently can employees work to solve problems? If one person continually asks questions and requests feedback before making an effort to solve a problem on their own, it can have a detrimental effect on the productivity of their teammates.

Take these factors together with any others you can think of and evaluate employee performance by assigning a numerical value to each one. Then you can come up with an overall productivity score by weighing the importance of each factor in relation to company objectives.

You will have an idea of how productive each of your teammates is and can take steps to improve their efficiency. Before we wrap up, we’ll share some tips on what you can do to increase productivity.

Ways to Increase Team Productivity

There are several things you can do to boost team productivity and help the people within those teams to flourish as businesses thrive.

You can:

• Be ready to offer advice and support – Make yourself available to people so they can come to you for support and clear up any doubts they may have. This will serve to keep everyone motivated and working well.
• Give team members power to make decisions so they are accountable for their work – This gives people a feeling of responsibility and makes them realise that the decisions they make will affect the whole team. By placing trust in people, you can strengthen team cohesion, boost self-confidence, and create a more productive, positive atmosphere.
• Pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of different team members – When you do this, you will be able to assign specific tasks to the people who possess the skillset most suited to deal with them, thus ensuring that everyone can work effectively.
• Foster excellent communication – Effective communication within teams can have a significant impact on productivity because it can help people understand their roles and responsibilities leaving less room for confusion.
• Use project management software – You can use project management software to help boost both individual and team productivity and facilitate collaboration. If you’re unsure which project management tool to try out, read our post on project management software to get some ideas.
• Offer constructive feedback -Why not start using the 360° review process to provide constructive feedback on performance, to help people identify inefficient parts of their work routine and give them pointers on how to streamline them and make them more efficient.
• Reward people – People tend to be more productive if they feel you value their efforts, so provide plenty of incentives to keep people motivated and happy.

Wrapping Up

We’ve covered why productivity and productivity management are crucial if you want to achieve success. Now that you know more about the concept, we hope that you have the confidence to start creating your own productivity management system that will ensure your business and the people involved in it will thrive. Why not implement some of the suggested ways to increase productivity to kick-start the new system?

Be sure to check out our post on how we can measure productivity if you found this piece helpful. Thanks for reading!