10 Team Productivity Metrics to Stay Aligned with Project Goals

Goals are great. 

Whether your favorite football team scores or you hit a fitness goal, they’re a reason to celebrate. Goals are a great way to drive focus and results. Knowing what you want to achieve is key to making things happen, but it’s not a simple case of setting them. Goals must be monitored and tracked to be effective.

Setting project goals is part of running any business. To achieve these goals, you’ll need a strategy to reach them, and part of that strategy should involve tracking and analyzing team productivity metrics.

Having a productive team is a fundamental part of building a successful business, so it’s important to have a way to pinpoint team strengths and weaknesses. Productivity metrics enable managers to plan relevant staff training and use positive data to motivate hardworking team members.

What Are Team Productivity Metrics?

Productivity metrics are an important part of effective project management. They quantify and measure employee productivity. This means measuring the activities that teams perform and how well they align with the overall goals of a specific project. Productivity metrics can be measured by key performance indicators (KPIs), which give a numerical or visual overview of staff performance.

How Productivity Metrics Keep Projects on Track?

Productivity metrics allow you to review your team’s progress toward achieving your project goals. They can help you see whether a project is on track and highlight why it isn’t. This enables managers to adapt the project strategy, train staff, or look at other ways to improve output.

Regular monitoring of KPIs can help managers avoid bigger problems further down the line. For example, if a project is a week behind schedule, measures can be taken to improve productivity before the problem escalates and the project becomes a month behind. They can also help you predict when a project will be completed.

10 Team Productivity Metrics for Project Alignment

We’ve looked at why it’s a good idea to use productivity metrics, but what should you monitor? Let’s look at 10 useful metrics to use when measuring productivity.

1. Task Completion Rate

The task completion rate measures the percentage of tasks completed within a given timeframe. It shows managers how efficient an individual member or a team as a whole is and can highlight gaps in the workflow.

The task completion rate can show you where to divert resources or workloads and is calculated like this:

Task completion rate = (number of completed tasks / number of total tasks) x100

2. Cycle Time

Cycle time measures how long it takes your team to complete a task or process from start to finish. These could be tasks that form part of a project and can flag up where bottlenecks are occurring in your workflow. Measuring cycle time regularly can help you establish an average to measure future projects.

3. Team Utilization Rate

The team utilization rate measures how well your team uses their available time. An average utilization rate is between 70% and 80%, and keeping an eye on how well your team is performing can help you stay on track to meet project deadlines. 

As much as 60% of a worker’s day can be spent “working to work”. This includes things like switching between applications, chasing approvals, or searching for information. Reducing these time-zapping tasks can improve team efficiency and help the team refocus on project goals.

Steps such as adopting a meeting invitation template and investing in integrated software to reduce the need to switch between apps can improve poor utilization rates. It can be calculated as a percentage like this:

Utilization rate = (Total billable hours / total hours available) x 100

4. Meeting Effectiveness

Meetings are a necessary but huge time burden on teams. Making sure that time is well-utilized and not damaging to productivity is important. There are several metrics you can use to track the effectiveness of meetings. These include:

• Timeliness. Do the meetings start and end on time? Meetings that are often overrun could indicate a lack of efficiency in presentation delivery or poor discussion management.
• Attendance. Are all invitees in attendance? Poor attendance rates may indicate a poor meeting culture and a need to duplicate the information shared. If this happens regularly, it could waste a significant amount of time.
• Action items. Counting actions from previous meetings and logging whether or not they have been met can show you how effective the meetings are. 
• Participation. Look at how engaged attendees are by rating the participation as full, part, or none.

1. Quality of Deliverables

Measuring the quality of deliverables tells you how well the team has performed on a certain project. Deliverables measure outcomes. For example, the initial project plan, progress reports, software installation, or new product could be classed as deliverables. Measuring the quality means determining how well that deliverable meets its purpose.

Ways to measure the quality of deliverables include:

• Customer satisfaction surveys. This can show you the quality of a product or service.
• A quantitative checklist to show which deliverables have been met.
• Cost variance. Did the project come in on budget?
• Return on the invested work (ROI).

5. Customer Satisfaction Ratings

Customer satisfaction ratings let you measure the customer experience. The data these metrics provide can help you make the relevant improvements needed to create happier customers. This in turn can reduce churn rates, improve retention, and increase WOM (word of mouth) referrals.

There are a range of KPIs that can be used to see how customers both view and interact with your brand. These include:

• Net promoter score. Allows you to measure levels of customer loyalty.
• Customer satisfaction score. provides an overall % of customer satisfaction that can be compared to the industry average.
• Customer retention rate. Shows you how well your business copes with reducing the churn rate.
• Customer lifetime value. Lets you know how much revenue a customer generates for you over the time they spend using your products/services.

6. Employee Engagement Levels

Measuring employee engagement levels shows you how well your teams and departments work together. KPIs for employee engagement also paint a picture of how productive and motivated your team members are and flag areas where improvements could be made. There are several useful KPI metrics to track employee engagement. 

These include:

• Absenteeism: Not only is high absenteeism costly, it can indicate a wider problem within workplace culture that may need to be addressed.
• Turnover rate: Again, a high turnover rate can show above-average levels of dissatisfaction in the workplace and also places a financial burden on businesses.
• Employee net promoter score: This measures how likely employees are to recommend their place of work to others. 

7. Burn Rate

The burn rate shows how quickly your teams spend the project budget. It’s usually measured every month to help managers look at the financial viability of a project and the overall sustainability of the business as a whole. There are two burn rate formulas you can use.

The first is the gross burn rate calculation. This shows you the efficiency of your business and excludes new revenue coming in.

Gross burn rate = cash on hand / monthly operating expenses

The second calculator is the net burn rate. This shows you how quickly your team is losing money.

Net burn rate = Cash on hand / monthly operating losses

Knowing this information can help you take action to reduce costs or drive revenue before it’s too late.

8. Velocity

Velocity shows you how much work your team can complete in a set timeframe. Velocity KPIs can be a great indicator of productivity and efficiency within teams and can flag bottlenecks to optimize processes for faster delivery. There are many metrics you can use to measure velocity.

These include:

• Sprint velocity: measures the amount of work completed by a team in a single sprint.
• Cycle time: shows you how long it takes work to move through the process to completion.
• Throughput: This measures the rate at which work is completed.
• Lead time: This measures how long it takes work to go from request to delivery.

You can track. your team’s throughput, along with a few other metrics, with Kanban Zone. Find out how this visual management tool can help boost your team’s productivity.

10. Collaboration Efficiency

When working on projects, team collaboration is important. Understanding the frequency and effectiveness of the collaboration in your team can show you the quality of it. There are certain metrics we’ve already covered that can show you the quality of collaborating contracts, such as those measuring staff and customer satisfaction and anything measuring the time and money it takes to complete projects. If these scores were good, chances are the collaboration leading to those results was good, too.

However, digging deeper into collaboration efficiency can be beneficial to gain a deeper understanding. You could use communication metrics, for example, to see how many messages are exchanged, or knowledge-sharing metrics to see how many files are sent to share expertise.

Questionnaires and peer evaluations are good tools to measure collaboration efficiency.

Pitfalls to Avoid When Using Productivity Metrics

Whilst metrics can provide an abundance of valuable data, there are several pitfalls that you can fall into. 

Focusing on the Wrong Metrics

The wrong metrics will provide the wrong results. To make sure you focus on the right productivity metrics, you must have a clear understanding of what you want to understand about your team’s productivity. This in turn should be considered alongside the project plan and goals.

Overemphasizing Individual Metrics

Time is money—or so the saying goes. However, if you only focus on velocity as a metric, you can overlook that all-important quality. If you focus heavily on quality, you may ignore the pressure that is put on your staff, which could increase staff turnover. It’s important to have balance covering the dynamics of productivity.

Failing to Account for Context

Context can have a huge impact on metrics. For example, if the workforce is hit by a raging stomach bug, output, velocity, and task completion rates will be down. On paper, this may look frightful, but in the wider context, perhaps unavoidable. Having an understanding of what’s driven fluctuations can be a great basis for improvement.

Neglecting Employee Wellbeing

If you don’t look after the wellbeing of your staff, it can come back to bite you. Undervalued, overworked staff are more likely to be either less productive, off more frequently, or leave after a shorter than average length of time. The result of any of these outcomes is a higher cost to you. Building this into your employee review process can help you show you care about employee wellbeing.

Lacking a Feedback Loop

The main benefit of measuring productivity is to make improvements in future projects. However, you can’t improve on past mistakes if they’re not fed back to the team. KPIs and metrics allow you and the team to find solutions to make improvements, so it’s important to have a system in place to analyze and use that feedback to implement systems to drive positive change. 

Conclusion

When you have a team working on a project, it can take just a few small cracks in the productivity machine to hold a project up and see costs spiral. To sustain a healthy business, projects should be tightly monitored to prevent this from happening, and productivity metrics allow you to do that.

The metrics you use should be relevant to your team and your goals so the data they provide is useful and actionable. Having a system to use the data to implement improvements means you should see the benefits moving forward. 

This is where visual management tools like Kanban Zone can come in handy. A Kanban board can enhance how your team collaborates and make productivity tracking more efficient. With its flexible board designer, responsive design, and advanced metrics features, a virtual Kanban board like Kanban Zone can be a great platform to boost your team’s overall productivity. Start your free trial today!