Productivity calculation to evaluate and boost your team's performance

Employee productivity calculation is a valuable performance evaluation tool that can help employers see who their top performers are and who might not be pulling their weight. It can also help employers spot those who are risking burnout (being 100% productive all the time is impossible) or notice other potential problem situations and prevent them before they escalate. Productivity calculations can also be used to optimize workflows and improve processes.

The easiest way to calculate employee productivity is to use a time tracking tool such as DeskTime to log their activities and count how much time is spent on specific apps and websites. DeskTime lets you assign a productivity status (productive, unproductive, or neutral) to each app and URL your employees visit. Then the time spent on productive apps/URLs is expressed as a percentage against the total time they spent working that day.

DeskTime calculates employee productivity and effectiveness by assigning a productivity status to each app and URL your team uses throughout the day (the statuses can be changed, and the default is neutral). Then as the DeskTime app tracks the websites and apps everyone uses and visits, time spent on each becomes productive, unproductive, or neutral. Productivity then becomes the time spent on productive apps/URLs divided against the total time spent on the computer and expressed as a percentage. On the other hand, effectiveness is productive time divided by the minimum number of hours employees should work and expressed as a percentage; this means that the effectiveness percentage starts low when the shift begins and gradually increases as employees accumulate the necessary number of hours for the day.

You can measure team productivity by measuring each employee's productivity and then calculating the team's average based on those numbers. If you use DeskTime, the average team productivity is calculated automatically and accessible to account administrators and owners in the Dashboard section. There, you can see an overview of the entire company's day (including absences, employees who are late, the most productive and unproductive employees, etc.). It is also possible to filter the view by teams to take a deeper dive into the stats of each department.

Productivity can be affected by external factors, like the environment you work in, and internal ones – how you feel at a given moment. Multitasking, interrupted workflow, loud environment, and various other factors that can throw you out of rhythm have decreased productivity; once you're distracted, regaining focus can take quite a while. Meanwhile, your mood during the day can also impact your productivity – if you're stressed about a big presentation you have to give that day, you'll probably find it hard to focus on other tasks. Plus, we're all human, and events in our lives outside of work impact our mood and, thus, productivity at the workplace.

DeskTime measures and calculates productivity in several ways, but the starting point for each metric is the productivity status given to apps and URLs your employees use throughout the day. Productivity is then expressed as a percentage of the time spent on productive websites/apps divided by the total time spent working that day. In the dashboard, you can also see the unproductivity percentage of your team members. Meanwhile, effectiveness is another metric you can look at – the amount of productive time of the day divided by the set minimum hours employees should hit. This percentage starts at 0% at the beginning of the day and rises as employees accumulate more productive time while working.

There isn't a single productivity percentage that's generally considered optimal since its calculation depends on each team's and account's settings. That's why when you start using DeskTime, you should figure out your team's benchmark, depending on which sites count as productive and which do not. Don't forget that it's also a good idea to customize the productivity statuses between teams – social media sites, for example, will be unproductive for most departments, but the marketing team might need to spend time on them for work-related purposes. So to make sure their productivity statistics are not unfairly skewed, customize the settings between teams.