Nowadays, it sometimes seems that many companies are participating in the productivity race, constantly taking measures to boost it even more. Numerous studies are conducted in order to find the new methods of motivating employees to work better. Countless methods have been invented for training staff maximally use all of their resources and become more efficient.
Well, the desire to increase productivity is totally natural and understandable on the employer’s side. This means that more work will be done in the course of the same time, ensuring faster business growth. Moreover, it promises a seducing benefit of saving money for new hires. Why not? If you manage to correctly motivate your staff, they will be able to handle the growing amounts of work. Sounds perfect, doesn’t it?
Adequate workload – key to ultimate productivity
It may sound perfect, and even look fabulous, but only in utopia. The reality is much more pessimistic… or simply closer to life. The fact is, employee productivity has its limits. To be more exact, if you try to push it beyond the limits, it will move in the opposite direction, resulting in overall efficiency drop. The question that remains to be answered is how to define where’s the turning point, when employees are working at their full potential and trying to get them do more will only worsen the situation?
The difficulty lies within the fact that it is hard to assess the situation “at a glance”, as the conclusions are subjective in this case. To a very demanding employer who sets goals that require strain to be reached, staff may always seem too slow and working at leisure, when in fact they are overworked and overloaded with tasks. To liberal managers, the slow tempo and a moderate amount of work done may look natural, when in fact they result from employees being bored with little workload and therefore spending time for personal matters.
Measuring employee workload using time tracker software
Fortunately, employers now have the full arsenal of means helping not only increase productivity, but also measure it to find the balance and reach ultimate efficiency level. Using time tracker software, it is quite simple to evaluate the current load of the staff members as well as spot any productivity issues based on the program reports.
So, how to “read between the lines” of the time tracker data?
First, since this software records total employees’ performance on the computer, it will show how much time they actually spend for work. In case there is very little or almost no usage of any non-work related resources, but still the pile of tasks to do is growing, it might mean that your employees are overloaded and it’s time to expand the team.
If, on the contrary, the report shows excessive usage of social networks, game websites etc. among your subordinates, then they either take their duties lightly or don’t have an adequate amount of work to do. In both cases, immediate measures have to be taken.
For employers who are ready to delve deeper, there is one more important point to consider. By tracking the productivity for some time, it’s possible to find out the periods of peak productivity along with the lowest efficiency times. While they can coincide for many employees, there are still differences that depend on the personality, biorhythms etc. This lets plan company activities taking into account the gathered data.
Moreover, due to the fact that different employees are most productive at different times, it can be a good idea (if applicable to the company specifics) to introduce flexible schedule. This way, all staff members will be able to work when they are most productive instead of the default nine to six. And you needn’t worry about keeping count of the hours worked – the time tracking app does it automatically, including all the breaks, so every employee will receive fair rewards.
A time tracker is also a way of improving discipline, and you can check out how beneficial this software will be for your company by trying out Yaware.TimeTracker for absolutely free, no matter how many workers you’ve got during the 14-day trial period, no credit card required.
