Workforce Analytics

How to Make Productivity Reports Dead Simple

November 16, 2022
IN THIS BLOG

If management-related tasks were divided into tiers from 1 to 5 with ‘1’ being the easiest, most managers will rank productivity reporting at 5.

The challenge increases tenfold if you’re dealing with remote teams where identifying some of the basic things, like the time an employee spent on a task, becomes a hassle due to communication gaps. 

This disrupts the flow of work, lowers productivity, and creates a chain of issues like:

  • Inability to identify work progress against actual capacities
  • Inability to track task progress 
  • Inaccurate calculation of billable hours
  • Inaccurate invoice generation 

To avoid all of these concerns, you need to make productivity reports dead simple, and that’s what we’ve covered in this blog. 

Here’s what you will learn:

  1. What productivity reports are and how you can use them 
  2. The key factors to consider in measuring employee productivity 
  3. Identifying and measuring KPIs
  4. Things you need to include in your employee productivity reports

Let’s get right into it. 

What is an Employee Productivity Report? 

Employee productivity reports contain all the necessary information you need as a manager to track task and employee progress, how much time your employees spend on different tasks, which projects were most time-consuming, and where an employee’s productivity boosted, etc. 

The information in these reports can vary from business to business. A metric you use to identify performance in marketing (digital campaigns with an engagement rate of over 30%) may not be relevant for a real estate company (which focuses on the number of deals completed per month).

Why is a productivity report important? 

The short answer is that they make tracking progress and performance easier and help you analyze productivity levels better. 

Here is the long answer: 

Increasing team efficiency 

Oftentimes, managers are unaware of how efficient their teams are. You don’t want 10 employees working on a project that can be completed effectively by allocating 5 resources. 

Productivity reports help highlight this issue. They show you the total working capacities of your team and the project’s requirements. If your team is not working at its optimal capacity, it will compel you to allocate more resources to a task. That means you are operating at a lower efficiency – something you can clearly derive from an employee productivity report. 

Effective resource planning 

Knowing which project to assign to which employee is critical for ensuring swift and effective outputs.

For instance, if Jake is good at a certain type of projects and takes less time to complete them, then those projects should be assigned to him. But for that, you need to know what Jake’s good at in the first place. Employee productivity reports will tell you this by showing you Jake’s performance against different projects, allowing you to plan future projects more effectively and become a better planner like Monica from F.R.I.E.N.D.S (we’re big fans, sue us).

Pinpointing  the weaknesses

You cannot fix a problem unless you know there is one.

As a manager, you need to know if one or more of your employees are underperforming. Staying in the dark will affect your team’s overall output and will hinder productivity by keeping you from utilizing your resources optimally. To avoid this fate, you need to look deeper into your employee’s work performance so you can identify the strengths and weaknesses of each team member.  

Using employee productivity reports, you can identify patterns where you are able to see the projects in which employees are delivering quality work and that too on time and where their performance is dwindling. Once you’ve identified core capabilities of your employees, you can assign tasks to them accordingly to increase your team’s productivity levels. 

How Do You Measure Employee Productivity?

You cannot measure your team’s productivity with a one-size-fits-all approach because measures that have worked for another company may not be well-fitted for your business’ dynamics. 

Let’s look at some of the ways companies measure employee productivity:

Calculating hours worked 

This is arguably one of the most common ways of measuring productivity. You specify the total daily or weekly working capacity of an employee (40 hours/week, for instance), and then you track the number of hours that employee actually delivers throughout the week. Some managers don’t consider this approach as it may not reflect the performance of an employee accurately.

Measuring the total output 

An increasingly popular way is by determining their output in a given time period. This is a task based approach where you gauge employee performance by the number of tasks an employee completes within a week. The more tasks completed, the better the performance. 

Determining profitability 

Another common way is by calculating the profitability ratio – the contribution of an employee in the influx of revenue. This usually works best for the frontline (sales forces), since their performance is correlated with the revenue your business generates. 

Using KPIs

Developing business-specific KPIs is an efficient way to calculate employee productivity. The idea is to create a baseline that helps you gauge performances. For instance, agile teams use Velocity as a KPI to measure the productivity of developers. 

Velocity is a complex measure where you allocate a difficulty level to each task on the sprint (a restricted timeline with multiple tasks) and then calculate the number of tasks your developers complete on the sprint against the difficulty of each task. This gives you a fair idea of how much effort a developer has put in during each sprint. 

Hint: You can use code average as a KPI, which determines how many codes make it to execution after the testing phase. 

Understand the Productivity Percentage 

What is good productivity? 

You ask this question to ten different people, and you’re likely to get ten different answers, and that’s because good productivity is subjective. For some people, it can be projects completed in an hour; for others, it is the quality of output (projects that are closed without revisions).

There are numerous ways you can gauge employee productivity for reporting. Whichever way you opt for, it’s always best to have a baseline – this is where the good productivity percentage comes in. 

A good productivity percentage is ideally between 70% and 75%, which means that your employees are productive 75% of the time. This is an ideal line to ensure maximum profits because exceeding it means you’re increasing the risk of employee burnout, which will eventually bring down your team’s productivity. 

 Recommended read: Employee Burnout: Here is How Effective Resource Planning Can Help

How does this help making employee productivity reporting?

Assigning productivity percentages to your employee productivity reports will allow you to gauge individual performances within seconds:

  • If it lands between 70% and 75%, you’re good 
  • If it exceeds 80%, it might look good on paper, but you’re risking employee burnout
  • If it’s below 70%, it means that employees have room to improve 

What Should Be Included in the Productivity Report? 

Let’s make productivity reporting simpler for you. Here’s what you need to add into your employee productivity reports to make them accurate and easier to read:

  • Total capacity: how many hours an employee can work per week
  • Billable hours and pay-rate: employee costs to compare with employee ROI
  • Task completion rate: number of primary/high-level tasks completed in a week
  • Total tasks delivered: number of total tasks delivered in a week 
  • Project completed: number of projects completed within a week
  • Total costs associated with the employee

These are some essential pieces of information that your employee productivity report should include to have a clearer picture of your team’s performance. 

What Does A Productivity Report Look Like? 

Here’s what an ideal productivity report should look like:

This report contains detailed information about the projects the employee is working on, the time spent on each project, total hours worked against the actual capacity, billable hours, and more. 

This employee productivity report is dead simple because it has all the necessary information you need to clearly identify how your worker is performing. Analyzing this report and taking out insights from it won’t take a few minutes tops. 

Make Productivity Reporting Dead Simple with Automated Time Trackers

Creating a productivity report manually can be an additional burden on your already-tiring routine as a manager. So, how do you resolve this issue? 

You do what modern managers are doing – use an automated time-tracker. 

Why? 

Well, because automated time-trackers are the single-best and most effective way to measure and analyze employee productivity across projects, all of that with minimal effort from both (yours and your employee’s) ends. 

They allow your employees to automatically track time spent on tasks and report it to you while you get to leverage the insights from the auto-generated employee productivity reports.

Recommended read: Why Modern Organizations Need Time Tracking Software

How Does timegram Help?

timegram is a zero-surveillance time tracking and project management tool that makes productivity reporting a breeze for everyone. 

For employees: all they have to do is take out 5 minutes at the end of their group pre-recorded activities into relevant projects (and leave out all the irrelevant information like their time spent YouTubing during lunchtime). Once done, they can simply submit the logs, which will be updated on your end of the dashboard. 

For managers: you get a transparent report containing employee performances, on which projects they spent the most and least bit of their time, how much of their actual capacity did they consume, and more.

Start your free timegram trial today to see how our tool makes productivity reporting a breeze for you.

Or visit this link to learn more about timegram.

FAQs 

How do you measure productivity of employee?

There are different ways to measure employee productivity. The best and most effective way to date is using automatic time tracking tools like timegram, which makes the entire process of reporting and analysis hassle-free.

How can we improve employee productivity?

The best way to improve employee productivity is through carefully examining the strong and weak points of each employee. You can do that by analyzing their performances against different types of projects. Then use this information to assign them projects where they are likely to perform better.

How do I prepare a daily work report?

If you want to save time and effort, yet end up with an effective, readable, and dead simple daily work report, using automatic time trackers is your best option. These tools track employee performances against and allow them (employees) to generate and share their automated daily work reports with you.

Can my company track my productivity?

Yes, if they have a time-tracking tool in place. Time-tracking tools provide managers with insights like your billable hours and time spent against different tasks, which helps them gauge your productivity.  

What are the types of productivity?

There are 4 types of productivity:

  • Capital Productivity: how well you use tangible resources to build physical products
  • Material Productivity: efficient use of materials (utilities) for services rendered 
  • Labor Productivity: the efficiency of your workforce (employee costs vs employee ROI) 
  • Total Factor Productivity: how your knowledge and management style impacts output 
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Umer Asad

About the author

Umer is a creative geek, a soccer enthusiast, and a self-proclaimed standup comedian. He brings over half a decade of writing experience to the table with a knack for the SaaS niche. In his free time, you’ll find him in queues at fast food chains, playing PUBG, or doing adventure traveling.

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