Small business owners in today’s competitive environment face new challenges when managing their employees’ productivity – In a recent survey conducted by Salary.com, 89% of employees admitted to spending between 30 – 60 minutes a day surfing the internet, checking social media sites or their personal e-mails!

“The single highest reason for employee terminations is inappropriate or excessive use of the internet while on the job.”

That said, there are some fundamental metrics that almost any business owner can implement, monitor, and use to pay their top performers what they are worth, while identifying areas of improvement for individuals who lag in some areas of performance. Proper and effective management of employee performance will result in higher staff satisfaction and reduced turnover.

“Once you measure something, it changes” –
Goodhart’s Law

How to determine if your company is suffering from low productivity

Manager’s in service related industries often bemoan the difficulty in measuring productivity of their workforce. In reality, there are many types of productivity measurements that can be integrated into the management system and used as metrics for employee performance evaluations.

• Unit of Service – the unit of service is a basic and important metric. How many customers a help desk operator is taking care of or how many appointments an appointment setter make in a day are easy items to measure and gives management a basic understanding of their employee’s productivity. Customer service activities performed via a desktop or mobile are easy to track using a comprehensive employee monitoring system.

• Productive Hours – In jobs where the employee is using a PC to interact with a customer, the total number of hours a day they’re actually on their machine can be a valuable indicator as to how much of an employee’s time is spent doing value added tasks.
• Time tracking Technology – Monitoring each employee’s computer activity can be as simple as installing tracking software that runs in the background and accounts for the activity level and websites visited of each computer. The best solutions on the market allow managers to set a “productivity score” for every application and website an employee visits, and even to tailor this scoring to adapt according to the employee’s particular role. Naturally activities that count as “productive” for one department may be considered “non-productive” for another.
  While browsing Linkedin for talent may well be within the realm of productive tasks for your HR team, the same activity from your accounting team might be cause for concern – Is someone planning to jump ship?

What say you?

Are time wasting employees a problem in our workplace? Let us know in the comments section below!