With 74% of US organizations implementing a permanent hybrid work model, leaders are focusing on monitoring the performance of their hybrid approach. That’s because there’s a single typical office-centric model of Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the office, but there are numerous ways to do hybrid work. Furthermore, what works effectively for one company’s culture and working style may not be effective elsewhere, even within the same industry.

So, how might a leader assess if the model they selected is appropriate for their company’s needs—or whether it need refinement—while avoiding bias?

Establish clear success metrics

The first step is to create clear success metrics. Unfortunately, few companies track critical components of the hybrid work transformation. For example, a new Omdia analysis finds that while 54 percent of firms saw increased productivity from adopting a more hybrid working style, just 22 percent built measurements to evaluate productivity gains from hybrid work.

Involve the C-suite

From experience helping 21 organizations transition to hybrid work, it’s crucial for the whole C-suite to be actively involved in formulating the metrics, and for the Board to approve them. Too often, busy executives feel the natural inclination to throw it in HR’s lap and have them figure it out.

That’s a mistake. A transition to a permanent hybrid work model requires attention and care at the highest levels of an organization. Otherwise, the C-suite will not be coordinated and fail to get on the same page about what counts as “success” in hybrid work, then find themselves in a mess six months after their hybrid work transition.

Identify quantitative and qualitative metrics

It’s a best practice for the C-suite to determine the metrics at an offsite where they can distance themselves from the day-to-day bustle and make long-term strategic choices. Before the offsite, it’s valuable to get initial internal metrics, including a quantitative and objective measures baseline. While there are plenty of external metrics on hybrid work, each company has a unique culture, systems and processes, and talent.

Based on the experience of my clients, companies focus on a variety of success metrics, each of which may be more or less important. Retention offers a clear-to-measure hard success metric, one both quantitative and objective. A related metric, recruitment, is a softer metric: it’s harder to measure and more qualitative in nature. External benchmarks definitely indicate offering more remote work facilitates both retention and recruitment.

Measure or assess performance

A key metric, performance, may be harder or easier to measure depending on the nature of the work. For instance, a study published in the National Bureau of Economic Review reported on a randomized control trial comparing the performance of software engineers assigned to a hybrid schedule vs. an office-centric schedule. Engineers who worked in a hybrid model wrote 8 percent more code over a six-month period. If there is no option to have such clear performance measurement, use regular weekly assessments of performance from supervisors.

Collaboration and innovation are critical metrics for effective team performance, but measuring them isn’t easy. Evaluating them requires relying on more qualitative assessments from team leaders and team members. Moreover, by training teams in effective hybrid innovation and collaboration techniques, you can improve these metrics.

Use surveys to assess subjective metrics

Several difficult-to-measure criteria are critical for an organization’s culture and talent management: morale, engagement, well-being, happiness, burnout, intention to leave, and silent quitting. Obtaining these measures necessitates the use of more qualitative and subjective methods, such as customized questionnaires tailored to hybrid and remote work rules. As part of such a survey, ask respondents if they want to participate in focus groups on these problems. Then, in focus groups, you can delve further beyond the survey questions to uncover people’s underlying emotions and motivations.

Weigh metric importance

Once you have baseline data from these diverse metrics, at the offsite, the C-suite needs to determine which metrics matter most to your organization. Choose the top three to five metrics, and weigh their importance relative to each other. Using these metrics, the C-suite can then decide on a course of action on hybrid work that would best optimize for their desired outcomes.

Assess, revise and reassess

Next, determine a plan of action to implement this new policy, including using appropriate metrics to measure success. As you implement the policy, if you find the metrics aren’t as good as you’d like, revise the policy and see how that revision impacts your metrics.

Likewise, consider running experiments to compare alternative versions of hybrid policy. For instance, you can have one day a week in the office in one location and two days in another, and assess how that impacts your metrics. Reassess and revise your approach once a month for the first three months, and then once a quarter going forward. By adopting this approach, my clients found they could most effectively reach the metrics they set out for their permanent hybrid model.

Top 5 Hybrid Work Productivity Metrics To Measure Success

While hybrid work may be preferred by employees, you must ensure that those working for your firm are as productive in a hybrid work environment as they are in the office. This is where productivity indicators come in. Measuring hybrid productivity measures can help you evaluate employee performance. Based on that data, you may eventually assess whether a hybrid work schedule is producing the productivity results you seek.

Read Also: Security Challenges and Solutions for Hybrid Workplaces

Productivity metrics track and measure how fast and efficiently people complete assignments. These indicators also provide valuable insights for tracking, managing, and improving employee performance. As one might assume, there are different sorts of employee productivity indicators, including quantitative and qualitative measurements. Let us look at a quantitative example.

Assume you are tracking the productivity of your sales staff, which generates leads via cold calling or a cold email tool. To measure your sales team’s productivity, you may do the following:

• Determine a set time frame for measuring productivity—for example, one month.
• Assign a value to a sale—for example, $100.
• How many phone calls are made during this period.
• Track the number of sales generated through these efforts.

Most quantitative measures link work inputs and outputs. Tracking inputs relative to outputs allows you to measure productivity in a framework that is consistent with your company’s and departmental Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and goals. In this scenario, dividing the input by the output allows you to measure overall productivity.

Tracking quantitative performance indicators allows you to eventually analyze staff performance. You can tell who is doing an excellent job and which employees require further assistance. While this is one example with a sales team, you can use a variation of this strategy for practically any work.

Now that you understand employee productivity indicators, let’s look at some popular ones you could utilize at work. Let’s get started with the major section of this guide.

1. 360 Degree Feedback

The 360-degree feedback approach is a qualitative productivity measure. It evaluates employee performance based on input from peers and coworkers. This performance statistic can only be used if people collaborate closely, as this type of feedback is quite straightforward. At the conclusion of each quarter, for example, you send an employee feedback form to all employees. Respondents are requested to provide input on how an employee completed their tasks. They are also asked how the employee has helped the organization achieve its goals.

In addition to input from colleagues, you may request feedback from clients and other stakeholders with whom the worker interacts as part of their employment.

The 360-degree feedback approach is an effective productivity metric for hybrid teams that cooperate. Using this method, you may determine whether working from home is considered to affect employee performance.

You can also receive qualitative comments on staff performance. These types of information will assist you determine whether a person gets along well with their coworkers. You may also notice minor flaws, such as a writer’s inability to write in the passive voice when all company communication should be in the active voice. In quantitative evaluations, these types of insights may be overlooked.

In fact, you can even use performance management tools to get 360-degree feedback and boost employee management. Based on the feedback survey results, you can build the best development plan for every team member and also measure progress over time by comparing results from different review cycles.

2. Management by Objectives

Management by objectives is a strategy of determining how employee production helps to meeting organizational goals. To implement the management by objectives strategy in your firm, you must have corporate and departmental SMART goals in place.

For example, your sales department’s SMART target could be to generate 10 sales per quarter. Assuming you have five employees in your sales department, each employee’s goal is to close two sales per quarter. With these goals in mind, you can assess the productivity of each member of your sales staff.

Tracking results in this way makes sense. After all, you want each person in your team to be hitting minimum productivity metrics. If an individual fails to hit targets, you can try to identify the source of the problem and provide support as needed.

3. Planned to Done Ratio

The planned-to-done ratio measures how much work an individual was allocated to do. To calculate the planned-to-done ratio, divide the number of tasks that should have been finished by what was completed. You then convert that value to a percentage.

The planned-to-done ratio lets you comprehend two things. First, you can use this measurement to evaluate staff performance. If one individual has a 50% planned-to-done ratio while the rest of the department has more than 90%, you know there’s a problem. The ability to monitor performance over time is also useful. You can see who works more effectively over time, as well as when performance drops abruptly or consistently.

4. Time Management Productivity

Time management productivity is a means of evaluating and assessing what people do with their time. In a hybrid, remote, or even in the office, time management productivity is generally assessed using time tracking software. The way time management productivity is tracked using these tools is usually straightforward.

First, you break your job down into its constituent parts. For example, a social media manager might hypothetically spend a day doing the following: 

• Creating social media posts
• Engaging with people on social media
• Filling in reports

There are three tasks on this list. You create three categories for your work. You then track the amount of time you spend on each of these tasks. The great thing about this model is that managers can see what employees do during a working day. Because some employees will resent this managerial style, you need to consider how much oversight is too much, and whether this approach is right for your business.

5. Productivity by Profit

The final performance productivity metric you might want to use is productivity by profit. The productivity by profit metric involves measuring how much money the tasks you do generate for the business. Productivity by profit is a useful metric to measure for companies that are looking to grow fast. If you know what tasks are making the most money, you can get people to focus more on the tasks that make the most money and less on tasks that have a limited positive impact on finances.

For example, imagine your media manager generates five leads a day on Pay Per Click advertising and no leads from publishing blog posts. In that situation, it makes sense to ask your manager to spend more time managing paid posts and less time managing the blog. This is a helpful metric, but it usually only works for sales or marketing-related tasks. 

Over the last 20 years, hybrid and remote work have grown in popularity. Working from home, whether full-time or part-time, needs a shift in how managers track employee productivity. This post explored five strategies to monitor staff productivity. We addressed tactics such as 360-degree feedback, management by objectives, planned to done ratio, time management productivity, and profit-based productivity.

Each of these models provides useful information on employee productivity. Now you must pick which of these productivity measures is best for your company.