How to measure employee productivity?

I believe that charts are a great way to monitor progress. When you use a chart that is posted in a conspicuous place it acts as a motivator. It will show you where you have been, where you are right now and where you are going. Benchmark the chart with three reference lines. First chart expected results. Then add a different line to indicate heroic effort and a red line to indicate the absolutely unacceptable level of performance.

Periodic self evaluation by the employees themselves adds to monitoring performance. This is helpful when plotting the charts. Also, advantage of having this is it ensure that ther eis no bad blood between the manager and the employee with regards to employee productivity measurement.

Most popular and accurate way of finding productivity is Daily Call Report (DCR), there have been situations where in an individual has put in his best efforts but unfortunately due to the deliciency in the product/service the same doesnt get sold. Hence it is important that you ask for DCR and guide the individual, by this way you dont only ensure that the individual is productive but you will also guide him in achieving the targets. Charts, Star's, Red Line, Gree Line all will depict only the performancebut will never guide the one who on RED Line and One who is moving ahead of the rest. DCR is the traditional and the best tool to ensure that productivity is achieved and same can be monitored.

I agree with you friend and I like to add something ie. access to competence. It is obvious, as an employee becomes more competent they are worth more to the organization. By charting the various tasks that need to be learned in a particular job function and relating those tasks to the levels of delegation you can assess a person's contribution to the organization. Using a matrix with tasks on one axis and levels of delegation on the other, you can develop a simple evaluation and communication tool that is very objective.

Every outcome in an organisation is the manifestation of the efforts put by a team or teams so it nearly impossible to accrue the output to an individual.So a better method would be to rationalize the effort and in turn the product.Let there be a product that involves 40% of logical thinking,40 % of creativity and 20% of hard work.Now let there be 4 people in the team including the leader.The process involved may include 20% coordination,30% of knowledge transfer,50% of team effort.Third factor would be the capability of employee in these aforesaid field. Rationalize the job or rather expectation from the individual based on above factor.Say for example an employee is highly logical with mediocre creativity and puts average effort.assign him on a scale of 1to 5 logic=2,creativity=4, hard work =3(since he is already very logical so he has to put less effort to generate same logic).let the job assigned has 10% of all above factors so expectation would be 10*2+10*4..and so on...for each member.Now when the product is ready again measure how each fared on their respective expectation.I think this would be fair enough to measure productivity rather than measuring everyday output,which may help in mundane lift-carry-drop type jobs but not in this highly complex architecture of efforts which are involved in big organizations.