What productivity indicators should you monitor to understand your performance?

Am I doing well at work or is my performance below expectations? The answer to this question is almost a step towards advancement or stagnation in your career. Therefore, monitoring your productivity indicators can be the surest path to a promotion . But how?

The first thing is to understand what exactly your performance indicators, also called KPIs, would be, then how to monitor them and, finally, how to optimize them.

If you want to accelerate your career , the time has come to delve deeper into the world of business and understand how it separates high-performing professionals from people with average or low performance. Follow all these details and much more in this post we prepared for you!

What are productivity indicators?

Productivity indicators are instruments that allow you to measure, monitor and manage business strategies.

Also known in the business world as KPIs, an acronym for the English words key performance indicators, they show the result of an action, whether in numerical or percentage form.

Examples of KPIs are:

• Number of visits to a company's website during month X;
• Percentage of increase in the number of sales between one quarter and another;
• How many employees trained in a given technology does the company have;
• Number of followers of a company on Facebook;
• Percentage of decrease in the number of bugs in a system.

How do KPIs work?

We already know that productivity indicators aim to evaluate the efficiency of a company's processes, right? Therefore, they function as a compass to indicate whether the organization is heading in the right direction (desired by the business) or whether something is wrong and must be changed to achieve the desired goals.

Still have questions? Don't understand how KPIs work? No problem, here's a practical example of how to use them:

Let's say that a company will need to build a blockchain system in a year that tracks the organization's entire supply chain with the aim of meeting some of the company's social, environmental and governance policy requirements.

However, the company does not know whether the ideal is to hire new employees who understand the new technology or whether it should train professionals who are already in the company to deal with blockchain.

For this decision making, some key indicators will be monitored:

• Number of people in the IT department are aware of blockchain technology;
• Number of IT employees will have to be trained to deal with blockchain;
• How long will it take to train employees on the new technology versus time to hire new employees;
• What will be the amount invested by the organization in training current employees versus spending on recruiting new employees.

All data from these KPIs will be collected and compared for more accurate decision-making and with an eye on the company's needs.

What productivity indicators should you monitor to measure your professional performance?

Each professional will have a particular productivity indicator to monitor their professional performance. But how do you know which one will be yours?

The following variables will all affect the answer to this question:

• Your profession;
• The market where it operates;
• Company you work for;
• Career Objective.

How to measure productivity indicators?

By now you have already understood the importance of key performance indicators, how they work and which productivity indicators are relevant to your professional performance, now is the time to know how to measure them. To do so, follow the steps below:

1. Define key performance indicators (KPIs)

The first step to knowing whether your business or your personal performance is going in the right direction is to define KPIs that can monitor this performance.

2. Create systems and processes

Once the key indicators have been established, it is necessary to clarify paths on how to carry out the tasks that will lead you to achieving the KPI goals.

Let's say you work in the area of ​​social media and need to use creative posts to drive more users to an e-commerce site. Ultimately, your main KPIs will be the number and value of sales driven by your posts.

To accomplish this task, you will need to know what audience you are talking to, what their needs are, what kind of information they want, and what attracts them. With this information in hand, it is easy to create systems and processes to achieve your KPIs.

3. Develop performance improvement plans

Despite clear goals and processes, even passionate and talented professionals sometimes have gaps between where their work performance is and where it needs to be.

If their performance isn't up to the clear expectations set for them, start a conversation with your leadership about it. Perhaps there is some miscommunication, or misinterpretation in the workflow that can be easily resolved through dialogue.

4. Review regularly

KPI reviews are a constant in the job market that needs to adapt to changing scenarios, inside and outside companies.

Therefore, always review with your leadership whether your goals and productivity indicators remain aligned with the new scenarios.

In summary, we can say that performance indicators are a quantitative value that allows the company to measure what is being performed and manage it in a beneficial way to achieve the goals of a sector, a department, the board, or the entire the company. An indicator, as the name implies, is a meter that provides useful information and aids in decision-making.