The hybrid work model generates a lot of buzz in the corporate world, and rightfully so. However, to experience all the benefits of hybrid working, you’ll have to closely monitor key performance indicators. This is essential for finding “weak spots” and giving your hybrid team the foundation it needs to grow in this still-shifting, post-pandemic landscape.
For many in leadership positions, adapting to remote work comes with a bit of a learning curve. You’ll need to adopt new, broader frameworks with the help of insights gained from setting hybrid work KPIs.
Without the hard data to measure productivity, the efficiency of your growth strategy will suffer.
So, where to begin?
While measuring employee productivity in hybrid work models requires some “out of the box” thinking – it’s not inherently complicated. Even making seemingly simple shifts in the type of data that you monitor can go a long way in helping you discern what systems work best for your employees and, in turn, promote the strengthening of your business.
Below we discuss some of the information that all companies converting to a hybrid work model should take into consideration.
A wise man called Peter Drucker once said:
You can’t improve what you don’t measure.
And you can’t measure what you don’t understand. Setting KPIs allows executives to do just that, providing necessary insights into team performance that may otherwise get missed. It’s the act of taking the time to determine what the appropriate performance indicators are that takes “success” from something subjective to something tangible and measurable.
How KPIs help depends on the area being addressed. For example, when working to develop content marketing strategies for a business, the indicators of success will be entirely different than when attempting to monitor employee engagement.
It’s all about finding and narrowing down the right information. While HR might use employee satisfaction KPIs to determine if it’s worthwhile to invest more heavily in diversity, equity, and inclusion, another branch of leadership might set KPIs to determine what updates to office technology are needed.
Creating the right flow when working on hybrid teams might be more of a challenge than you’d think. On paper, it seems like an automatic way to strike that “perfect balance” so many businesses strive to create for their workers – but getting there and reaping the many touted benefits takes patience and planning.
For example, remote work requires a level of self-discipline that those unfamiliar with being out of the office may struggle with at first. Without adjustments to workplace strategy with more employees going remote, productivity might suffer – and you can’t make those adjustments without the right data.
Paying attention to KPIs early in the transition to a hybrid setup can help reduce the potential negative impact of shaking up your work structure.
By implementing hybrid work productivity metrics off the bat, you can:
Often, as you yourself as a leader have likely experienced firsthand, a bump in the road in one department can negatively impact the others. For this reason, you should aim to be as thorough as possible when setting metrics and measuring productivity.
As you’ll see in the more thorough breakdown following this section, there are key metrics to consider in just about every aspect of the workflow when striving toward company success.
That said – here are 4 major KPIs that all managers should monitor:
Now, let’s take a more detailed look. In the end, we have a fifth KPI as a bonus for those who make it to the end.
These will help you track and improve how well your teams and individuals collaborate.
Source: Gallup.com
While the skill sets and goals of your various departments may differ, it’s important to remember that at the end of the day, they’re all on the same team.
Are they acting like it?
According to Harvard Business Review:
75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional.
Suppose you aren’t monitoring how well your staff collaborates. In that case, you’re leaving your company susceptible to contention between staff members, and a waste of the talent that you scouted (and probably pay a hefty salary to retain).
In a KPI sense, team overlap is essentially the opposite of productive teamwork. It’s no good to have two employees both expending energy and resources on the same tasks. Your employees should be working on their own, separate tasks that serve as necessary components of a shared goal.
Often, it’s a lack of organization that creates this scenario.
Hybrid working can make clear communication and, in turn, effective collaboration more of a challenge. That is why adapting to the use of new tools, such as project management dashboards, is so important when companies switch to working remotely.
Project management tech offers many benefits in this area. It enables remote workers to see clearly defined tasks, how many projects remain, etc. Depending on the software you purchase, it may even help monitor data such as average time spent on tasks.
By the way, one of the expected hybrid work trends is the increased usage of data analytics.
Data suggests that:
Over the course of this past decade, time spent on collaborative work has increased by 50% or more. It’s thought that collaboration efforts consume about 85% of many people’s work weeks.
Too much collaboration may hinder your employee’s productive hours and contribute to burnout. Without the structure of the office and in-person conference rooms – it can be even harder to strike the perfect balance.
That’s why it’s imperative to get an idea of how much time your employees are spending on actual work vs. brainstorming about tasks with colleagues. Ensuring that your managers are promoting balance between focus time and collaboration makes room for a smoother, more efficient workflow.
It’s also important if you want your business to stay relevant in a world of workers that are tired of “busy work”.
Meeting participation can be a good overall indicator of employee satisfaction. How this KPI pertains to your company will depend on its policy surrounding meeting attendance. These days, many hybrid team leaders have adopted a more relaxed approach to meetings.
Suppose this is your scenario, and your employees are willingly showing up to meetings without the pressure of compliance. In that case, it demonstrates that they are invested in doing their part to stay updated and connected to company objectives.
If your meeting attendance is lacking – whether you have a strict compliance policy or not, it indicates that a company may need to renew initiatives surrounding engagement.
The below metrics will give you a clear understanding of how well you utilize your office space.
Reducing waste goes beyond just tracking costs. For example, say that you land a fantastic deal on a subscription for new software. It seems like a great fit for your team, but after putting your employees through the training, they seldomly put it to use.
You presume that your remote employees are taking advantage of it but fail to realize that only about 1/4 of your workforce finds it helpful. The subscription auto-renews month after month despite its low popularity, creating an unnecessary expense.
Even sending out a simple, quarterly survey to your team to find out what tools they’re utilizing the most can go far in wiping out excess costs.
While the remote working aspect is a big component of setting hybrid work KPIs – the way that things flow in “the office” requires monitoring as well.
Many businesses have cut back on expenses by taking advantage of flex and coworking spaces. Depending on your setup and in-person attendance policies, you may struggle at first to determine how much space you’ll need to house your staff.
Taking note of things like desk shortages, the amount of time spent utilizing in-person meeting rooms, along with other resources on a week-to-week basis can help you to mitigate future shortages relating to in-person attendance.
Keeping thorough data can also assist you in determining if there’s a legitimate shortage of space or if that lack of space was a sporadic event.
While being short on space can lead to delays and frustration, it can be equally problematic to have inflated utilization numbers. Keeping and using data surrounding “ghost” bookings can assist in assuring that the insight you’re using to make decisions accurately reflects the needs of your team.
Accurately monitoring this data might sound daunting, but these days with the rise of hybrid working, there’s analytics software that can help optimize hybrid workplaces.
A higher employee-per-desk rate can drive cost savings. With that in mind, it’s important to balance the urge to cut costs in this area. If you aren’t careful, you may throw other KPIs like employee satisfaction out of whack.
Resource availability, or a lack thereof, can have a big impact on workflow and impact how your team feels about the office environment.
What follows, is a set of metrics that will help you determine ESAT, a.k.a employee satisfaction.
Productivity is the goal, but if you’re experiencing a high turnover rate, you might need to reassess. There are all sorts of factors that can influence poor retention.
A round-up of statistics showed that:
While pushing employees to work long hours in the name of hitting metrics might appear to boost company performance data in the short term, in the long run, it may require you to drain excess time, effort, and resources into a continuous cycle of onboarding new staff.
Monitoring your turnover rate and also compiling data surrounding reasons for leaving can go a long way in strengthening the roots of your company. Taking the time to investigate the reasons surrounding poor employee retention can also help you keep your company competitive.
Going hand in hand with the point above, happy employees seem to be more invested in their productivity. In fact, research suggests that workers are 13% more productive when they’re happy. This is great news if you’re one of the companies out there that actively works to prioritize employee satisfaction.
Employee satisfaction, overall, is a good indicator that things are flowing well within the structure of a company. Often, if there’s a problematic policy or strife on the management end, it trickles its way down to the workers – setting a tone of frustration.
Getting a genuine feel for your company’s overall employee satisfaction level (rose-colored glasses won’t cut it here) is crucial for gaining an accurate assessment of overall performance. Trends of low satisfaction among workers don’t appear out of thin air – there’s a root cause to get to the bottom of.
That root cause could turn out to be the culprit of numerous other setbacks to growth, too, so it’s worth it to put on your detective hat.
Here are some starting points to consider for employee satisfaction:
Employee NPS stands for employee net promoter score. Tracking this will give you insight into how satisfied your employees are with the office.
It does this by breaking your current staff into three groups:
While this might all sound complicated, it’s actually very simple.
Having a clearly defined work policy is a great way to manage expectations surrounding workflow. However, structure needs to be balanced with flexibility to truly promote growth on a broad scale. It’s important to provide your team with opportunities to share how your policy impacts their work experience.
If your employees are “stretching the limits,” it’s likely stemming from some sort of conflict or frustration within the workflow. Providing your staff with ways to leave anonymous feedback on a routine basis will give you real insight into how they feel.
Taking the first steps in ensuring that you’re gathering accurate data surrounding policy satisfaction and compliance can go a long way in hemming any rips before they do serious damage to your company’s internal structure.
Sending out regularly scheduled pulse surveys is a quick and efficient way to do this.
Whether with fully remote work or hybrid work, it can be challenging to measure hybrid work productivity metrics in all areas that play a role in business growth and success. However, not measuring it, would be a mistake.
Productivity KPIs are limited to areas where there is hard data and throughput.
OKR stands for objectives and key results. It’s a goal-setting framework that enables teams to track results and monitor progress toward clearly defined qualitative goals.
For example: let’s say that you ask your marketing team to increase traffic on a page for a service that customers seem to overlook. In this case, you would need to have a clearly defined percentage for the increase you’re hoping to see, and a time frame in which you hope to see the increase. The marketing team would then need to determine what “key results” serve as accurate markers for progress in meeting that goal.
“Key results” in this case could be:
Some additional basic productivity KPI examples include:
Sales
Support
How close of a look have you given your onboarding process? These days, workers often have recruiters reaching out left and right. If you want to remain a top choice for the top talent that you’re after, you have to make a good first impression.
Additionally, statistics suggest that employers with a strong onboarding process may improve productivity by over 70%.
It’s worth paying attention to.
It’s important to have an idea of how long it’s taking your new team members to get fully up to speed, especially in the early stages of converting to a hybrid team. What worked before may no longer be appropriate.
Source: worklytics.co
If managers still report a lot of “hand-holding” at a point in time when you’re expecting workers to confidently meet productivity metrics independently, your process may need an overhaul.
Tracking onboarding ramp rate data gives critical insights into your hiring process and its weak spots. Addressing those weak spots sets your staff up with the strong foundation needed to keep staff output where you need it to be.
Additional onboarding KPIs include:
How you measure the success of hybrid working will depend on your company’s unique strategies. To best measure the success of hybrid working, you should set key performance metrics that match your business’s processes and actively monitor that data.
Monitoring work performance in a hybrid workplace can be a challenge without the right tools to help organize the data. These days, many companies find project management tools to be a big help in compiling the data needed to make accurate judgments about work performance.
Managing performance in a hybrid workplace can be challenging, especially when team members are doing their job from home. You can best manage your team’s performance by having clear, updated guidelines that reflect the changes in your business policy since making the switch.
One way you can measure employee productivity in a hybrid setup is to take advantage of various tools designed to help those in your position within the organization and measuring of data for teams that work remotely.
The “Planned-to-Done Ratio” relates to a team’s ability to demonstrate self-discipline within a remote work setup. It is a way to predict and measure performance in the future by observing the ratio of work that teams commit to doing compared to the amount of work that they actually complete.
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