Productivity Condiments: Improve Your Productivity Not Just Production
Over the years, there has been a paradigm shift in business operations. Companies, small and large, have now started focusing on productivity rather than production. Surely, the production levels matter because they determine your sales, revenues, and profits. But productivity matters even more because it is a measure of the value that your business delivers. An organization that is capable of delivering more value with fewer efforts will be able to generate higher revenues and profits at lower costs.
Over the years, there has been a paradigm shift in business operations. Companies, small and large, have now started focusing on productivity rather than production. Surely, the production levels matter because they determine your sales, revenues, and profits. But productivity matters even more because it is a measure of the value that your business delivers. An organization that is capable of delivering more value with fewer efforts will be able to generate higher revenues and profits at lower costs.
Therefore, it becomes essential to focus on the personal productivity of the workforce and business productivity as a whole. Tracking personal productivity is easier as compared to monitoring business productivity. To start with, you need to identify the different systems, processes, and operations involved in the business, understand how they work and evaluate the level of productivity they deliver. The next step would be to work on improving these levels if needed. Let us list a few productivity metrics that can be used to establish the productivity levels for business.
Workforce effectiveness
The overall workforce effectiveness serves as a key metric to evaluate personal and organizational productivity. It comprises details such as the number of staff members, time spent by each individual, shift effectiveness and more. The measure of this metric indicates the level of efficiency of the workforce on a regular basis and what the business has achieved over a period of time. Besides helping you to calculate the productivity levels, workforce effectiveness is also of great importance to the HR department of the company.
Sales growth
Undoubtedly, the sales that your business generates are the most obvious and critical productivity condiment that is worth assessing. Measuring sales growth in an actionable manner is all about tracking the individual performance of the sales professionals against their territories and targets. Flexibility is the key to understand what works and what does not because the sales landscape is highly dynamic. Once you are able to identify the productivity gaps using this metric, you can realign your sales strategy to boost the productivity of the sales team.
Customer satisfaction
As businesses have to face tough competition in the market today, sales growth is not the sole objective for them. Besides booming sales, you need to focus on customer satisfaction as well. To start with, you need to focus on delivering quality products and experiences. Also, customer surveys play a significant role in this context. You can improve your customer satisfaction with Simplesat, which is a reliable survey tool. The tool gets you the valuable feedback of the customers, which you can use to identify the gaps between your offering and their expectations. Addressing these gaps is the key to happier and satisfied customers.
Employee turnover rate
Coming back to the internal productivity condiments, employee turnover rate is one metric that you cannot ignore. Employee turnover is an inherent part of business operations because employees come and go. Retention is desirable because people who stay longer with you gel with the organization and deliver higher productivity over time. A low employee turnover rate is an indication of happy employees who are imperatively more productive. Additionally, it translates into lower costs for recruitment and training. A high one, on the other hand, is something that needs attention because it spells low productivity levels for your business.
Time management
As the name implies, time management evaluates workforce productivity on the basis of their ability to manage their time. This is usually done with specialized software tools and applications. An accurate measure reveals the time spent on productive activities and identifies the wastage as well. The overall objective is to identify gaps and set goals for the reduction of wastage of work hours. This productivity parameter becomes all the more important for growing organizations with a large number of employees as measuring individual productivity becomes challenging for the management and owners.
Employee motivation
Another productivity condiment that you must keep an eye on is employee motivation. Even though this metric is not measurable, it still remains a key one when it comes to assessing how productive your business and workforce are. Motivated employees have an urge to contribute to their best performance, which automatically leads to an increase in their productivity. The management should, therefore, emphasize this parameter to get the best results for the business.
Now that you have a clear idea about the metrics that have a key impact on the productivity of your workforce and systems, enhancing it becomes easier. Keeping track of these metrics helps to understand where the bottlenecks are and this makes easier to address them to get your business back on track.