The introduction of global lockdowns in 2020 forced us to radically re-evaluate the way we thought about concepts like productivity, time management, and work environment.
Now in 2022, for many, this was an opportunity to redefine how the workday is structured to better meet their goals in more flexible time frames.
How well this new level of freedom works largely depends on the individual and the unique requirements of their workday. Still, we believe that many people can work effectively from home – and for a large portion of the population, it also represents additional benefits like reduced stress and anxiety, cutting down on commuting time and costs, and more control over one's working environment.
However, when we start talking about working from home from a team perspective, sometimes it can be necessary to monitor productivity to ensure that certain members aren't being overloaded while others slow down and that there remains a balance that helps management meet its goals while also being fair to the wellbeing of the individuals within the team.
After all, these are straining times, and metrics like productivity and output should also come with a level of wanting to put staff in positions to meet their goals without burning out. To do this, measuring productivity should also be about helping individuals make more efficient use of their time to lessen the burden and stress of working from home while allowing them to reap the benefits.
To help you facilitate this, we've written down a list of 4 work from home metrics to track your team's productivity and why they're important.
4 Work From Home Metrics to Track Productivity in Remote Working Setups
1. Call volume
With communication such an integral part of any team-based system, the time staff members spend doing different levels of communication is an important metric to ensure that key time is being dedicated to the right places.
One of the first distinctions it's important to make when measuring time is between the different group members in your team will need to be in constant contact with.
Customers, for example, will have their own dedicated call time and volume. Here, your team will generally need to be allocated more time to thoroughly engage with clients to help them with any problems that may arise or maintain key relationships that keep clients within the consumer base.
This will vary from business to business and at what level customers are engaged with, whether cold calling to facilitate an initial sale or customer support for pre-existing clients to encourage continued engagement and transactions.
There will also need to be calls made to management throughout the day and communication between members of a team to coordinate tasks and ask for assistance. This doesn't even account for scheduled meetings between management.
Measuring this call volume can give you a good insight into how your team is spending their communication time, who, and what value this time provides.
2. Task completion rate
A well-structured team will have a set of major goals divided annually, quarterly or monthly – with some overlap. These goals will then need to be broken down into weekly and daily tasks representing the smaller steps we must take to achieve the larger outcomes.
Each team member should have a clear set of instructions on what they need to achieve and must be given the space to suggest the tasks to accomplish this best.
Once a clear list has been established, leaders or the management can create a checklist. This metric should almost always be measured as a percentage of tasks completed by their set deadline rather than several tasks completed in a day or week. Different jobs will have tasks that require different resources, time management, and collaboration, which can vary the black and white number of tasks on the checklist wildly.
Using percentages allows you to judge more fairly if individuals within the team can meet their preset expectations if they're struggling and what needs to be adjusted for better productivity.
3. Encourage individual time tracking
One of the least invasive ways to measure productivity is by encouraging your team members to track their hours throughout the day. This can give both of you a clearer idea of how time is being spent, which hours are the most productive for them, and which hours need to be set aside for team-wide coordination.
We can complete many tasks in a team members' own time provided they meet the deadline – trusting your team is essential to remote working – but finding which hours overlap the most within your team can better understand how and when to schedule team-wide activities like meetings.
4. Track progress on priority tasks
While some tasks only need to be monitored for when they are complete, larger tasks might have different stages and obstacles that need to be tracked to ensure that they're being done promptly, as part of work from home metrics.
This can include weekly tasks and monthly goals or tasks that have a particularly difficult coordination point with third parties. Hosting calls and allowing your team to give progress reports and explain any issues is a great way to monitor this while encouraging your team to collaborate in problem-solving, even in isolation.
How Can DashboardFox Help in Tracking Team Productivity in Work From Home Metrics?
Working from home can be both a blessing and a bane to others. For some, it means they have more relaxed rules without their bosses breathing down their necks, while for the leaders and the HR, it can pose a challenge because you are not physically there to see if they are doing their jobs or not.
When you are tracking your team’s productivity, you cannot rely on their word that they are really getting their tasks done. You cannot also use their “I’m doing so and so deliverables by today” in assessing their productivity and writing progress reports for their monthly evaluations.
You need an organized system where everyone can see where everyone is based on their targets and who is reaching what by the end of the week or month. It is important to track your team's productivity using work from home metrics.
A well-made, transparent, and easy-to-understand dashboard is needed so that leaders can easily track who is doing what at what pace easily because as much as we want to trust our team members, some of them go far as to lie without producing much blatantly. For small and medium businesses, this can be catastrophic. Thus, you need business intelligence for your project management.
Thankfully, DashboardFox can make that possible. If it isn't obvious in our name, let me tell you that we can make your productivity checks more efficient with our interactive dashboards. Depending on the team's needs, you can easily customize it without ruining anything else.
With DashboardFox, you can easily track the productivity of your team members without having to breathe down their necks in person, thus making sure that your members' work from home metrics are being hit.
What are you waiting for? Contact us or better yet, book a live demo for free to see how we work because what you see is what you get.