6 Strategies to Increase Employee Productivity and Utilization

So, even though your company is growing and you’re busy, you still believe your workforce is underutilized. Businesses frequently want to boost employee productivity and utilization without understanding how their project and resource management systems function.

The soul of your business is the billable hours of your employees, but they may also be a headache. The ratio of billable hours to total hours worked is an employee utilization rate. Likewise, if this rate declines, you risk losing employee productivity to non-billable tasks.

Several strategies for increasing employee utilization rate can assist your business in generating more income and productivity and provide your staff with a positive work atmosphere. This post reviews a few easy techniques for evaluating your team’s performance and strategies to boost employee productivity.

Monitor your Current Productivity/Utilization and Time Management

Many variables govern how productive or well-utilized an employee is. 

So, which one is more productive? An employee who works 8 hours daily on internal product development/service delivery? Or one who works 10 hours per day but spends 3 hours on administration, breaks, and socializing? The answer is that we have no idea from hours alone how this impacts the goals and objectives of the business.

Effective utilization measures how many hours are billable rather than just how many hours are worked. A variety of factors impact productivity and utilization. You must first and foremost have an understanding of how your staff is currently using their time. 

Utilizing timekeeping software to track projects and activities can be matched to employee hours. There will probably be varying degrees of productivity because most people have various skill sets, expertise, and experience.

Time Tracking

At the very least, billable personnel should track and document their daily actions. MyDirecteur’s TimeTracker may aid in this process by reducing employees’ need to manually input all their hours and activities.

Defining Variables and Analyzing

How do you obtain the data for analysis after implementing a timesheet tracking system? 

By categorizing your projects, you may evaluate the value of the work your employees do for your company. This might be as straightforward as chargeable and non-chargeable tasks for a services company. More detailed measurements, including portfolio metrics, may be necessary for an internal IT department.

Keep an open mind and consider other elements, such as the success of your planning and management, when examining the amount of time your staff spends on a particular project or service. By classifying actions as charged/non-chargeable or productive/nonproductive, you may get a clear view of your employees’ work.

Company owners can use this information gathered from your billing activities, timesheets, and projects to develop precise benchmarks and targets. As a result, it can improve the utilization of your teams and individual personnel. For example:

• Are billable personnel doing non-billable tasks like copying that other members of your office staff can handle? 
• Is a customer consuming your team’s time while offering little value to your business? 
• Is there a specific project type where your entire team could require training? 

Data analysis gives you valuable measures to use when tackling workforce utilization at your business. Additionally, it assists you in identifying crucial financial elements of your business. For instance, a project’s value might help you better plan your expenditures and resources for upcoming projects.

Managing client Expectations

Lack of focus on the customer’s expectations before project completion is one of the most frequent mistakes many organizations make before implementing a solution or standardizing a project management process.

Suppose you make sure that everyone involved in the product/service delivery process clearly understands the scope, risks, deliverables, and acceptance criteria related to your projects. In that case, there will likely be fewer project issues, less slippage, and fewer budget overruns. Leave all of your resources alone and concentrate on more productive tasks.

Using our project management tool, you may implement a straightforward, basic project management procedure.

Manage Stakeholder Expectations

It’s essential to control your client’s expectations. But are you managing your internal stakeholders’ – your employees’ – expectations in the correct way? 

Your team’s capabilities must be well understood by your business development representatives. Business development representatives should communicate with project managers often to clarify expectations. Your billable staff members should be aware that time is a precious business resource and should plan to spend it responsibly.

Keep your expectations in check. Workers are human beings too. They will require some downtime to consider solutions, deal with non-billable business-related concerns, and chat with coworkers about initiatives.

Plan Smartly

Thanks to the adoption of your timesheet system! You now understand your employees’ performance and how it relates to productivity and utilization. However, this information does not compare to your planned task for the employees.

You may get appropriate employee productivity and utilization data from project planning software and resource scheduling tools, like MyDirecteur. Then you may use this information to compare key performance indicators (KPIs), such as planned vs. actual usage and planned against finished deliverables. Instead of only focusing on actual usage, these data will provide a far more realistic view of how your employees are doing.

Set Reasonable Goals

Although every project is unique, with time, you will better understand the time commitment required for various project types. Setting realistic utilization targets gives employees and departments a baseline. Additionally, it promotes more effective resource allocation and planning for businesses. Depending on your company’s present condition, a feasible aim would be to achieve 75% of billable hours per month.

Organize Your Workplace to Be Productive

It involves building a productive workplace where staff members exchange ideas, call on one another’s expertise, and lessen the effects of absent resources. This is where teamwork and project cooperation are crucial since it is well known that more can be achieved when people work together. By providing your project team members with a platform where they can work in harmony and exchange ideas and knowledge, your organization will immediately benefit from: 

• Higher creativity
• Better problem-solving
• Improved efficiency in project execution. 

And where each team member’s contribution is focused on a common goal.

Incentivize

For businesses to become more productive, more morale-boosting, and more cohesive as a team, it is crucial to make employees feel as though they are a part of the business’s overall success. Individuals and teams are rewarded with incentives or special privileges when they achieve their goals.

MyDirecteur can help you increase employee productivity and utilization 

Increasing staff utilization rates will take some time, but it will benefit your company’s bottom line. You may recover lost productivity, spot weaknesses, and possible growth areas, and boost profitability by managing expectations, tracking time, evaluating employee productivity data, creating realistic targets, and rewarding your teams’ billable hours.

You require an all-in-one program like MyDirecteur to make the most of your employees’ usage. It allows you to monitor your projects in real time so that you are constantly aware of their status and how you should act in return. Time and expenditure tracking, project management, accounting, billing, and other features are also included.

Get a free trial today to learn how MyDirecteur can assist you in analyzing and maximizing staff utilization rates.