Measuring employee productivity can be tricky business. For certain roles, the metrics may seem obvious, such as active pipeline for sales reps or average response time for customer service teams. But for other positions, such as marketing, engineering or HR, assessing output and efficiency gets murky. Plus, adding remote and hybrid work environments to the mix makes understanding employee productivity even more complex. To boost productivity, it’s important to also focus on the employee experience, as employee engagement and productivity go hand in hand.
Quite simply: a happy employee is a productive employee. So, let’s look at what’s needed to help employees feel enabled, empowered and productive.
What is employee productivity and employee engagement?
Employee productivity is about helping individuals get as much quality work completed as efficiently as possible, looking not just at the end result, but the time and effort needed to get there. This means taking skillsets into consideration, as well as ensuring employees have the tools and support to be fully engaged.
Employee engagement often comes down to connection and commitment, and how invested and passionate individuals are about their jobs and their contributions to the company. Creating strong employee engagement increases productivity—and can directly impact the bottom line. Organizations with highly engaged employees experience 23 percent greater profitability. [1]
Combatting employee churn
We are in a talent retention crisis. Employees continue to say goodbye to organizations in record numbers, with many resigning even before another job is secured. A survey by McKinsey highlights the employee churn epidemic, which was spurred by COVID but continues to plague businesses in the present day. Three key takeaways of note:[2]
- Employees are leaving by choice: 53 percent of employers are experiencing greater voluntary turnover than in previous years.
- Employees are willing to be unemployed: 36 percent of employees who quit in the prior six months did so without having a new job in hand.
- Connection and engagement really matter: The top three factors employees cited as reasons for quitting were not feeling valued by their organizations (54 percent) or their managers (52 percent) or because they didn’t feel a sense of belonging at work (51 percent).
Before we dive into meaningful action to help retain employees, let’s look at common employee engagement and productivity challenges that could be hurting the employee experience and increasing churn.
What are common employee engagement and productivity challenges?
Regardless of the industry or company size there are several common information, process and technology roadblocks that hurt how people work, connect and communicate. How many of these ring true for your organization?
- Old tools run rampant. Employees are overwhelmed with too many apps. According to Gartner®, the average employee uses 11 applications to complete their tasks, up from six in 2019.[3]
- Information is hard to find. Content is scattered across multiples systems, impacting the ability to access and use it in a timely manner. Gartner went on to find that 47 percent of digital workers struggle to find information or data needed to effectively perform their jobs.
- Employees feel the heat. Too many tools and a lack of information leads to mistakes. Nearly one-third of respondents in the same survey said a lack of awareness over key information led them to make a wrong decision. And another 45 percent reported getting irrelevant notifications.
- Systems and content lack reach. While hybrid work environments are likely here to stay, employees struggle to be productive from anywhere due to a lack of fast, easy access to modern work tools.
To improve employee engagement and productivity, organizations need to create a foundation for smarter, frictionless experiences. By leveraging the right tools and technology, organizations can better enable and empower employees, delivering more value to the employee experience and more value to the business.
How to increase employee productivity in the workplace
A big piece of the productivity puzzle is tied to content. By bringing together content, people and business processes, content services platforms serve as the conductor to operations, helping orchestrate day-to-day tasks and make it easier for employees to do their jobs, stay engaged and remain loyal to the company.
By leveraging modern business workspaces, organizations can tackle common productivity challenges in four important ways:
- Bring everything together. Templated business workspaces centralize content, people, workflows and tasks to one place to enhance information access and value.
- Work the way employees already work. Integrate content within already familiar interfaces, such as Microsoft Teams and Salesforce, to give employees needed access and insights without leaving the applications they use every day.
- Provide a single source of truth. Equip teams with dynamic, accurate, real-time data integrated from other platforms to minimize errors and improve decision making.
- Support anytime, anywhere engagement. Improve collaboration, knowledge management and communications for hybrid and remote employees to create more connected and empowered teams.
Ready to leverage information management to increase engagement, employee productivity and profitability? Discover how to master modern work with OpenText.
[1] The Powerful Relationship Between Employee Engagement and Team Performance, James K. Harter, Frank L. Schmidt, Sangeeta Agrawal, Anthony Blue, Stephanie K. Plowman, Patrick Josh, Jim Asplund. Gallup. 2020.
[2] McKinsey & Company, ‘Great Attrition’ or ‘Great Attraction?’ The Choice is Yours, Aaron De Smet, Bonnie Dowling, Marino Mugayar-Baldocchi, and Bill Schaninger, September 2021.
[3] Gartner® Press Release, Gartner Survey Reveals 47% of Digital Workers Struggle to Find the Information Needed to Effectively Do Their Jobs, May 10, 2023
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
