According to one study of Microsoft employees, remote workers tended to be more productive. However, this may not be the case for every business.

You may still want to track some metrics to ensure that your employees are productive enough.

But what are the most important productivity metrics you should track? Keep reading to find out!

Cost Per Project

If you want to make sure employees are being productive, cost per project is one of the most important productivity target trackers.

For example, businesses will save money on rent and utilities by allowing employees to work remotely, but do you need more tools or timesheet applications to track how many hours employees are working? You may even need to pay to equip employees with the tools that they need to complete each project.

You need to track this metric throughout each project so you can manage your company’s budget. You’ll also want to compare this budget with your company’s revenue to ensure that you’re making money.

You may even want to track it per employee. If some employees are taking too long to complete a project, they’re going to have a higher cost per project than employees who can complete the project in half the time.

Milestones

This is one of the easier ones to track when you have clear milestones for each project. You can have your employees mark their progress, and it’ll make it easier for them to learn how to manage their time to ensure they meet each deadline.

It will also give you visibility so that you know if an employee is making progress and completing tasks on time.

When you can break down a long task into different milestones, you’ll also be able to see how long it takes to get an average project done so that you can plan for the future.

Working Hours

It can be hard to track hours worked for remote teams, but it’s not impossible. Instead of having employees clock in when they get to an office, you may want to keep track of when employees log into their VPN.

You could also implement timesheets that employees can fill in when they’re done working for the day. This way, you’ll still be able to keep track of how many hours each employee is working. You can also have them divide it by project so that you can understand how many hours each project takes.

In addition to regular working hours, then you’ll want to track the number of overtime employees are working. When employees are working overtime, this doesn’t always mean that they’re being productive.

Instead, you should try to understand what their workload looks like and try to reduce the number of hours that they’ll have to work overtime. When you have employees working overtime too frequently, then this could be a sign that they don’t have a good work-life balance, which can lead to burnout. When they’re burnt out, their productivity will tend to drop over time anyways.

Desktop Activity

Desktop activity is a great way to manage remote employees when you can’t see them in the office. However, keep in mind that whatever software you put on your employees’ computers could affect their computer speed or reliability.

It can also be a hard metric to track if your employees don’t have a good Internet connection that can disrupt their remote meetings, send instant messages slower, or receive emails slower.

If it doesn’t affect their speed, then you’ll want to see how long they’re active on the computer. In some cases, you can also track what projects they are working on and how long they were active on the computer.

Retention

Retaining talent is important to reducing your human resources costs, but it’ll also ensure that you have a higher productivity rate. When you have to hire new employees constantly, then this could also hurt your employer brand, which makes it even harder to hire talent.

If you have a high retention rate, then you likely have employees who are happy with their work and don’t feel overworked. When they are happier at work, they’re more likely to be productive.

If you want to find out if you have a good retention rate, you can calculate it by taking the number of employees who have left during a given period, and then dividing it by the number of employees that you had. Then, multiply it by one hundred.

Customer Satisfaction

Are your customers satisfied with your product even after you make the switch to remote or flexible working environments? This will help you ensure that employees are still delivering a great product even while working remotely.

Your customers are important to growing your business, and you need to make sure that your customers are happy and will want to come back.

It’s a good indicator of how well your employees will perform when your employees are performing well. You should also track how satisfied your customers are with the product. You can send out employee satisfaction surveys or ask for reviews.

You can ask questions about things like the quality of the product or service, the customer service experience, or the price. You may also want to ask how long the project took to be completed or if there were any delays with the delivery.

Discover More Productivity Metrics

These are only a few of the most common productivity metrics that you can track, but you may also want to track employee satisfaction on your remote teams.

We know that ensuring you hire productive employees is essential to a successful business, which is why we’re here to help you out.

If you’re interested in hiring the best employees for your remote teams, make sure that you check out our website.