Employee Productivity & Technology

Distributing technology to achieve the most efficient allocation of resources.

Whether running a business as a CEO or a small business owner, look for technology and resource allocation that could be put to better use.  This happens in cases where an executive or friend or family member gets the better equipment, though they might not be the most productive person.

Another obvious case where this happens is with business owners themselves.  Should the owner have the best equipment? Those who lead and manage aren’t always able to maximize usage of the latest technology for several reasons. 

In some cases, it's because they aren't in the office as much, or they aren't as technologically inclined, etc.  That doesn't mean that your computer should be slow, but watch out for taking or giving a powerful computer that could be put to better use. 

How can this affect the overall productivity of a company?

An employee's productivity is much more than just the hours they work.   There are many factors which create a complex formula.  Some other factors are skills, knowledge and work ethic. However for simplicity, let's say all your employees have similar work ethic and keep the same hours so the productivity for a given employee is the formula below:

Productivity = Skills * Knowledge * Technology

Notice that the technology is a multiplier of their productivity (there are divisors of productivity as well, such as interruptions, but that's another article). 

Now if you have two employees Jane and John, the productivity of your company in a given day will be the productivity of John + the productivity of Jane.  If Jane has 10 times the skills and 10 times the knowledge and the superfast computer is 10 times faster than the standard machine, how much would it improve your overall productivity by giving the faster machine Jane? 

There are physical ways to measure this in terms of real world productivity, but using our simple example, if both employees were doing the same job, and then by giving the computer to the more productive employee would yield an efficiency improvement of 810%!  Even though it's not a real world formula, the simplification does prove a point. 

Your company stands to benefit drastically by having the right equipment in the right hands.

There are tools available to capture real world numbers, but a word of warning first—these tools should be used cautiously.  There is much more to the efficiency of employees than just equations and measuring.  In some cases, measuring and giving productivity feedback to employees will immediately increase their performance, as they strive to reach better numbers. 

But in others, it could be a detraction if the productivity measuring is seen a distraction and busy work, or resisted if it's forced upon them in a strong way.  The intent of monitoring and providing feedback in productivity should be to inspire and encourage.   

Now how do you measure the actual productivity of an employee and track it?

• If you have a manufacturing process, a custom system can be designed to measure key performance indicators with collection points at various places in the process.  The development of the custom software is more affordable these days and will yield results for the rest of the life of your business.

• It is an investment in the future of your company.  If you have an idea in mind for this type of solution, please contact us for a free consultation in software development.

• Another much less expensive way to measure productivity for companies, in the case of office workers using computers, is an off the shelf software as a service, such asRescue Time

• Rescue time installs a small program on the computer (that doesn't slow the computer down) and monitors the computer's activity.  It sends this information real time to the rescue time's servers and gives feedback in terms of charts and graphs to the employee or manager.

You can quickly analyze how much time is wasted in non-productive activities such as Facebook or browsing the news. And in cases of personal productivity, this tool can be used for free to monitor you:

Example of a Rescue Time Graph

• Then there is good old fashioned stopwatch, pen and paper, with your friend the excel spreadsheet.  Contact us for advanced spreadsheet setup needs you might have.

Each business is different in terms of how and what to measure, but one of the above is usually the first step in capturing the metrics.  Only with those metrics can you analyze where you are, where you were, and where you want to be. 

Capturing the right information can help you determine where to inject technology that will yield the best results to eliminate bottlenecks in your system.

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