Most employers, business owners or managers don’t really know how productive their staff are and have very antiquated Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).
Some use the turn of the century way of measuring how many hours they “show up” at work. This derived from past practices where close supervision was possible, or production line work where the output per employee was already fixed. Maybe, now, it’s just convenient to count time since time equals money; at least some people will say so!
When people asked me how much time I spend at work…..I started timing myself for real….and only start the timer when I’m actually doing programming time and not during coffee breaks, lunch, google searching, etc. I did this years ago keeping a log of the actual time spent programming. Out of the eight hours of office time (usually in USA it’s 8am – 5pm) I was surprised to find that I only did 2 hours of “real” work.
Out of my 40 hours a week during “business hours” I only coded for 10 hours! Back in the day (over 20 years ago) I was getting paid around $130,000 USD a year, if you factor the actual programming time I spent and the compensation I got, it equates to something of $250 USD an hour.
Well that’s 20 years ago! So factoring inflation over time, that comes to $381 USD an hour… but now I have an extra 20 years of technology and management experience so, climbing up the corporate ladder with hands on programming, implementing systems and managing teams , that’s even more valuable.
Now, when I look at the output of the teams that I manage, I look for results and not necessarily for the time they spend googling the syntax of the programming language. (Now we don’t need to google either! We have linters in the IDE)
So for technical coding output, I look at when they did a Pull Request and their code and I can see the changes they made. Some can be very intricate and hard while some are trivial. Overall, I value the skill, not the time involved.
For non coding tasks, I setup goals and metrics (assuming you can define the right metrics) and estimate the time needed for these tasks for the top 20% of workers. In my experience, the gurus of these tasks can really get things done super fast. For example, if I see how one person with little experience package a product in 5 mins versus a pro that can do it within 5 seconds and then you know you want someone who can perform the task in 5 to 15 seconds per package. Of course not all people are the same but let’s say top 20% is 5-15 seconds then you can expect a certain throughput for that individual. Benchmarking your team against the best, you may be shocked at how inefficient you really are.
Have you setup your goals and metrics for each tasks/jobs to be done and created baseline for them?
Gimme a hollar and I’ll fix your metrics, send me an email: william@williamma.com