Answer to Question #242588 in Management for Mol

Question

What are the things to consider when measuring work performance for workers who are working at home?

Answer 1

Discussion

Even before the global pandemic made working from home routine for millions, increasing numbers of people had been saying goodbye to their onerous commute to work. Thanks to ever-evolving technologies like Skype, Face-time, Slack, Zoom, Google Hangouts, authentication apps, and cloud computing, also texting and email it's no longer necessary to be in an office full time to be a productive member of the team. In fact, many kinds of work can be done just as effectively, if not more so, from a home office.

As appealing as remote work is to employees, it wouldn’t be such a strong trend if employers didn’t also recognize the benefits from their side of the desk. Companies with work from anywhere policies can boost employee productivity, reduce turnover, and lower organizational costs.

Below are some of the things to consider when measuring work performance for workers who are working at home;

• Having a policy for measuring work-from-home and remote employee productivity

At the most basic level, productivity is a measure of output per unit of time. One can add more business-oriented measures like customer satisfaction level, increase in sales or increase in website visitors to their productivity measure.

So the first step in measuring productivity is to create a policy that clearly lays out how one will do it. It will help put in place right tools and process. The employees will know exactly how employer will measure them. This transparency will build trust with employees and help them prioritize their work.

• Milestones for each task assigned to an employee

It’s easy to track progress when a task has clear milestones. Employees can mark the progress correctly and employer can be sure about their progress. With clear milestones, employees can report progress every day instead of waiting till the end.

Milestone reporting gives employer visibility. The employer can see if an employee is making required progress to complete the task on time. Breaking down a long task into milestones helps one collect important data for planning future projects. Employer can track time taken to reach each milestone and this helps create a better project plan in the future.

• Task or project management software to track work and create visibility

Keep everyone on the same page by using a cloud based project management software. Create a team-wise Trello board or Asana project that shows what everyone is working on. Consider using different project tracking systems for teams doing different things like marketing and software development.

Assign tasks to individuals, track their progress and receive notification as they complete the tasks. Measure productivity of employees by tracking the number of tasks they complete each week or month. If there are multiple people working on similar tasks, rank these employees by their productivity.

An added benefit of an open project plan is the transparency and accountability it brings to the team. Team members can see who is doing what and how things are going. This visibility also helps improve the team productivity by pushing everyone to do their best.

• Track how much time employees are spending on work

Tracking time is essential to measuring employee productivity. It’s the denominator in the equation: Productivity = Output / Time

An online time tracking software like Hive Desk automatically tracks how much time employees spend on work. At the end of each week or month, employer can see an accurate data about how many hours each employee has worked and can calculate productivity by combining this information with the number of tasks completed or output produced by the employee.

It’s hard to separate work from personal life when working from home. This creates problems for employees as they lose track of how long they are working. An employer can help employees maintain sanity and also meet legal requirements by using an online time tracking software. If managers doubt that someone is slacking off, all they need to do is check the person’s time-sheet. Since the software tracks this automatically, it’s reliable and accurate.

• Implement a robust reporting structure

Timely reports help one stay on top of the work, identify potential problems, and take early action. The reporting structure implement depends on employer managers’ preferences. Many people like to get an end-of-day report that lists day’s progress. Others are happier with a weekly update. Keep the report formats short and to the point.

A bullet list of tasks completed is good enough for the daily report. The weekly report should include weekly time-sheet, tasks completed, plans for the next week, and any roadblocks/risks

• Having a proven system like Objectives and Key Results(OKR) to measure progress towards goals

Measuring daily productivity of employees is a good management practice. But employers also need to measure progress towards their business goals. After all, what’s the point of having a productive team if employers do not achieve their goals?

The advantage of using an established system like OKR is that employers have ready-made tools and dashboards. These track their daily, weekly and monthly progress towards goal. With a dashboard, they can know at a glance what’s happening in their business. They can even set these up in a spreadsheet if they don’t want to use a tool and employees can manually update it every day or employers can automate the process.

Reference

van der Lippe, T., & Lippényi, Z. (2020). Co‐workers working from home and individual and team performance. New Technology, Work and Employment, 35(1), 60-79.