Hi Natasha

Why do you need to measure productivity and how can you be sure it's related to engagement?

I think it would depend on your industry and what you can measure. For example, I analyse the amount of time employees are spending on billable client work. More billable hours = more productive, although not necessarily more engaged.

Natasha

What do you make or produce? If its widgets then measure the widgets. If its cars....etc. (Thats productivity sorted then!)

,
I don't quite understand the link you state with engagement. Neither do I understand why you use absenteeism to measure engagement. How can someone's breaking a leg or having genuine time off for an illness or injury is connected to engagement.

Hi
Sorry, but may be being obtuse this late in the day but would be very interested in knowing how monitoring absenteeism is used in the way you say for productivity and/or engagement?

In reply to Susan May:

Just to observe that such as the galley slaves of ancient times tended to be very productive (the whips / brutal punishment regimes etc saw to that) but that had nothing to do with levels of engagement.

Similarly today, production lines and rigorous quality control and employee control can and do result in high productivity but nothing to do with levels of engagement.

As others have intimated, you really need to define what "productivity" means in your business in order to be able to select units of measurement that are relevant. David rightly identifies the number of people (and implicitly, the amount of time) needed to produce x units of goods in a production environment; in consultancy or engineering design services it is more likely to involve the proportion of worked time that is billed to customers.
As regards engagement, the only measures that seem to provide some degree of tested correlation involve surveying staff on this subject. To date I haven't seen an "engagement meter" that has been proven to work.
I agree with what others have said which I would paraphrase as "correlation is not causality". i.e. more whip strokes will produce more effort on pulling the oars, but that us by no means an indicator of engagement.

In reply to Ray:

@David & Ray, perhaps it was thought that being beaten to make them row harder demonstrated that their 'management ' loved them and needed them. :-)

In reply to David Perry:

Indeed David, and the galley slaves lived in dread of one of their colleagues dying at his post - that meant that the management would almost certainly organise a "whip-round" in his memory.....

In reply to Ray:

Groan.

To pick up on Ray's point about an engagometer that works, my favourite instrument is the Gallop 12. There are so many on the market that claim to measure engagement but many are not rooted in solid research. Natasha, I agree with the previous comments that you if you measure productivity you aren't necessarily also measuring engagement. Using the Gallop 12 would give you reliable data you can use to focus on activity which will build engagement. Marcus Buckingham's book, First Break All The Rules is, IMO, essential reading for HR professionals.

Back on galley slaves, if you are ever in Barcelona, visit the Maritime Museum. They have a life-size galley and information on the economics of operating a galley. The slaves are your engine and you need them to be working at peak efficiency, which means e.g. carrying enough water to keep them all hydrated. Also, the museum building itself is interesting. It is the medieval building where they built galleys. If you're interested in history or architecture there are plenty of medieval churches surviving and some medieval houses, but not so many examples of medieval industrial buildings.

In reply to Elizabeth Divver:

About measuring productivity, just might be worth adding tthe  point that in engineering design, yes as was mentioned that design hours booked to paying client jobs is a common measure of commercial productivity but design hours booked to bids and proposals etc is ‘productivity’ just the same too. Some non productive hours such as staff absences are clear enough, but the trouble is of course that a lot of other non productive time gets booked out to current jobs by default. For example, a designer will invariably book a full day of their time to their current job whereas in reality they may only have spent a fraction of the time booked actually designing and the rest chatting to their colleagues or on Facebook or whatever.

So time booked out to clients is often a most unreliable measure albeit that it can be the best one you’ve got.

This becomes very apparent when there’s a shortage of work - there may well be an ‘idle time’ category to book against but if they get the chance most people won’t want to admit that they’re sitting around with nothing to do so will book this idle time to any other job they can mange to do so. Therefore  design hours on jobs during slack periods can become hugely inflated and works of fiction essentially.

An experienced person wandering quietly through a design office ideally frequently can usually readily gauge how hard or otherwise the designers are working, but not of course empirically.

In reply to David:

PS

On the galley slaves topic, in an engineering design environment, I well recall lighthearted discussions with workplace union reps when they’d start accusing me of being harsh or callous or dictatorial towards their colleagues, when I’d say something like ‘just wait until after Christmas when the Management are going to buy me a bigger and better whip to use on you all......’

But of course we all knew that everything was in reality far far more complicated than that fantasy...........

In reply to David:

I agree David - but as we bill clients per hour, we do have to be able to justify what those hours were used for, so its hard for people to "hide" their idle time with in a project without getting called up on it! Having said that, we do get a fair amount of time booked to "internal meetings" :-)

As you've said, its about being on the floor and talking to people, as well as managers reviewing the actual outputs - reports can only tell us so much!

In reply to Polly:

Sure it varies massively on a spectrum, Polly, depending on how easy or difficult or feasible or whatever it is to audit bookings of time to jobs.

Hi Natasha

epmetrics.com which helped my organization to enhance productivity. maybe it will help you to increase your productivity stats

In reply to David:

We are a consultancy company and billable work is the measure of productivity/utilisation. There is split for billable and non billable work as you've expressed here.

However, I'm not equipped with the tools to measure engagement and this is the focus of my role for the upcoming year. Currently, our HRM has been equating engagement with productivity. We need to separate productivity and engagement and create a better strategy for enhancing engagement levels. Many of you have expressed my thoughts on this more articulately than I did in our last meeting. Any ideas on this are very welcome.