Metrics to Measure Your Team’s Productivity

Just like one cannot use the same scale to weigh everything in the world, leaders shouldn’t use one metric to measure the productivity of teams that perform different tasks.

The metric that declares a marketing team successful cannot be used to evaluate the progress of a team that handles finance.

As a company, it is important to evaluate the performance of the team in order to judge whether the team is performing up to expectations or not.

It is only when the team effort is correctly evaluated that you can come to a conclusion whether the business development goals are being met and how the outcome can be further improved.

In no way does this article recommend discarding the old techniques of performance review such as one-on-one review or appraisals but merely suggests looking at employee performance in a different light.

Following are some metrics that you can track so that you can ensure that your team keeps up its productivity:

Planned-to-Done Ratios

There can be several reasons for projects not getting completed. It could be due to a change in your branding tactic or the fact that your company has redirected its focus and efforts to come up with a new product which they believe will serve their customers better.

The planned-to-done ratio measures the percentage of tasks that you had assigned to your team and how much of it was satisfactorily completed by them. Performing an analysis of the amount of work that your team gets done should give you valuable insights into the capacity of your team and also its potential.

If your team is consistently achieving only a small percentage of the tasks that you set down for them then it is possible that your planning process may not be as effective as you think it is or your team could be lacking the basic skills that are required to do the job.

Cycle Time

Instead of tackling a project as a whole and setting a faraway deadline for its completion, it can be broken down into bite-sized segments so that you can optimize the process that you use to measure productivity.

By employing this practice you can measure your team’s productivity in terms of ‘cycle time’. A short cycle time means you get more work done in less time than the one with longer cycle time.

When deadlines is a long time away there is little pressure on the team to work on the project efficiently. However, when you break down the project into small segments the time is divided into fragments too. As a result of the upcoming deadlines, your team is pushed to work productively.

Attendance

You shouldn’t treat this metric like the one that is used in schools with a roll call. When the size of the team is small, greater collaboration is needed amongst the team members and the presence of each team member makes a significant amount of difference to the overall fate of the project.

Even if team members are working remotely their level of commitment towards their work is quite evident from the way they work. You should pay attention to the number of meetings missed, how many sick days have been taken and how late an employee is usually to work.

Escaped Defects

It is a popular metric of performance in software development teams but can also be extended to teams from other domains. In software teams, it usually refers to the number of bugs that they missed in a particular product.

In other teams, these defects can be considered to be those mistakes which affect the customer. For instance, if you are a part of a marketing team, a defect could refer to a failed social media campaign or a customer’s complaint.

While such issues can be less frequent in teams which are not into developing software as there are certainly more bugs in a single code than there are glitches in a product.

Besides productivity, there are various other aspects of an employee that you can use to reduce their overall level of sensibility such as how well they take care of their health or how determined they are to write a Will today and secure their financial future.