Employee-Productivity Matching Flaws

Earlier we wrote an article about a way to anonymously match employee productivity with employee loyalty. Doing so will give you a rough idea of how loyal your best employees feel, while maintaining research integrity and promoting honest answers. However, all of these methods can represent some flawed logic on the part of management – especially with how productivity is measured.

The most problematic issue is that productivity itself is often poorly measured. Very few companies have objective measurements in place to ensure that productivity is being measured accurately. Most use subjective reports on the part of managers and supervisors, and subjectivity means that you may be ignoring great employees in favor of less impressive employees that hold favor.

Similarly: Some employees fail to produce simply because they do not have enough work to do, and giving the more work would greatly increase their output. Some employees fail to produce because their work isn't appreciated, which is a management issue, not an employee productivity issue. Some employees produce, but what they produce is not being accurately measured in favor of someone else's work that may either not be as valuable or is equally valuable but more easily measured.

If your productivity measurements are wrong, the data itself is going to be far less beneficial. Your productivity measurements have to be as correct as possible. This includes everything from actual measurements of performance to something more subjective, like an employee review.

If these are not accurate, you will not learn anything from the data. It's also important to remember that loyalty, satisfaction, and performance may also be linked. Employees that are unhappy are likely to be disloyal, and may not be producing to their full abilities.

On the one hand, an employee that fails to work hard when they are dissatisfied may not be an employee you value. On the other hand, there may be serious issues within the company that lead to such low satisfaction scores. Regardless, these all represent potential flaws with matching performance and loyalty – flaws that are almost entirely due to poor performance metrics.

Before you can consider launching employee loyalty efforts based on productivity scores, you first need to make sure that all of your productivity and performance metrics are measuring the employees fairly and accurately. Only then can you hope for the data you collect about loyalty to be worthwhile.