Performance metrics: 6 examples to increase productivity

17 of June, 2022

Performance metrics provide you with valuable data regarding the health of your business. They are divided into qualitative and quantitative indicators and can measure pretty much any aspect of your company’s activity. How many sales you are making, how efficient your business plan is, how productive your employees are, how profitable your projects are… You can determine all this and more with the right performance metrics. And if you use an HR software like Sesame, then getting the HR Reports should be a piece of cake.

Employee performance metrics

Many factors influence productivity in the workplace, so you want to have a clear understanding of what is affecting your company’s productivity and what you can do to improve it. The following performance metrics should help you measure your productivity rates and identify its top influencing factors.

Efficiency

Efficiency is all about the quality of the work you get done in a certain amount of time. In other words, it determines the value you create during a defined number of work hours. Efficiency is an important indicator that relates to productivity.

Productivity

Productivity differs from efficiency in that it focuses more on the quantity achieved rather than the quality of the work. So basically, it’s about how much work can get done in a certain amount of time.

Knowing the general productivity levels within your company is great and can help you manage your humans resources more efficiently. But measuring the productivity within a certain project can help you identify more accurately the factors that influence it. By comparing the productivity rates of different projects, you can get a better understanding of why your employees are more or less efficient.

Work quantity metrics

Depending on the nature of your activity, there are certain work quantity metrics that you can use in order to evaluate your productivity levels. For instance, an indicator that is quite easy to calculate is the number of sales an employee makes during a certain period of time.

However, when the sales cycle is longer and more complex, you might want to focus on other metrics than just the number of sales. These can be the number of phone calls, the number of potential client contacts, the number of active leads, etc.

Another employee KPI you should measure if your business is part of traditional manufacturing is the number of units produced. This is a very reliable indicator of your workers’ productivity. But other businesses can also adapt this metric to their own domain. You could for example track your writers’ number of keystrokes per minute, or the number of lines of code that your programmers generate.

Business and sales performance metrics

Sales productivity

This indicator measures how quickly a salesperson meets the revenue goals that you set. If you already track work quantity metrics, then getting your sales productivity rate is easy since it depends on the number of sales made.

Activity

Activity metrics analyze what a salesperson spends time on daily. It consists of a combination of quantity metrics such as the number of phone calls made, the number of emails sent, the number of contacts with clients, etc.

Profitability

Productivity directly influences profitability. Indeed, the more productive you are, the more profit you make in the same amount of time. So you should track your projects’ profitability to ensure an optimization of their productivity levels.

We hope this article has been useful to you. Do you want more information about human resources management? Then stay in the blog section of Sesame HR.