Measure productivity – how to do it manually – Overview
- How do you measure people?
- Who can you measure?
I am going to take you through the actions and show you how to establish the criteria to measure anyone of your staff or employees.
The first action is to write down your company name and exactly what the company produces, be very specific without getting too wordy. Example: Affordable Kitchens, Commercial Kitchens, Lavish Kitchens – Cleaned cars – Built houses – Landscaped Properties etc…
What you are looking at is, what the result of the company is. This may alter as you move through this action. After all every employee, staff member, manager or contractor should be aware of what the company is suppose to provide/produce to its clients and then how what they do fits into that end result.
The next action you need to do is make a list of all your permanent employees.
Now make a list for all your part timers, casuals, permanent part timers etc.
List out any permanent sub-contractors
Their Names: John David
When you have done this you then must decide on their Title (Position Title or Job Title).
In doing this action it is important to try and be as accurate as you can. It is not enough just to call someone a worker, a staff member or employee.
Position (post)Title: Office Manager, Office Secretary, Office Assistant, Sales Clerk, Accounts Clerk, Sales Representative, Carpenter, Foreman, Welder and Boiler Maker etc (you get the idea).
Now this may seem unimportant to many but as you proceed further, their Titles often describe what they are hired to do.
If this becomes difficult, and it does, you will need to work through and write down all the actions that person does each day; in other words: “What do you pay them to do?”
Based on the answer to “What do you pay them to do?” is the next question “What is the result of those actions?” or “What is it they are paid to provide in terms of results or products?”
Now what I’m doing is providing some education on measuring the productivity of the individual. This can appear very confusing and I can assure you it can be for the untrained.
Let’s take a salesman, these are fairly easy to measure really:
Name: Fred Jones
Title: Sales Representative, salesman, counter salesman, sales clerk, telephone sales and there can be more…
Actions: what are they expected to do?
How do they go about their work?
What results are you looking for?
Results: Sales completed – Ok the result is a sale, or an order, whatever it is it must be a finished result, nothing left incomplete.
OK so let’s now measure what you pay a salesman to produce. You could measure their number of interviews, or number of contacts, or value of sales, or number of sales. There is a variety of methods to measure sales personnel or even a sales department or a sales manager.
I am talking here about sales personnel because these people are the ones who get the highest recognition because they can be measured easily most of the time and can also manipulate the bonus systems or schemes.
Management can easily fall into what we call “sales management traps” in other words they can manipulate some major accounts on when they buy to meet target etc. (with the Win-Win System this does not happen without being noticed at the end of the trading week).
Ok so let’s look at this again and start writing:
You’re Industry
Name
Title
Actions
Result
Measurement of results
Now once the above is done on each staff member and you have decided on the results to measure, it then must be worked out how and where to get all this information on a daily basis or at least on a weekly basis.
All information must be verifiable in every way so not to put anybody in any kind of hot seat where they have to make guesses on their results. Something is there or its not, it is done or its not, half done jobs or actions don’t count until it’s completed.
Now what do you do with this information you have just identified to measure the production of that Position Title (hat), and who is the person wearing the hat?
So now we are going to put all this information onto a graph for a visual aid for both employee and manager to see and reflect on.
How to create a graph will be the subject of our next article.
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