A team full of hard workers is of course the dream of every company. But are your hard workers also productive? And what about the external people you hire? Do you know how much they really contribute and when they cost an unnecessary amount of money? These are questions every manager faces. That is why in this article we give you the tools to map the productivity of your organization.
Insight into your utilization
To start your analysis you need insight into the utilization. This means that you need to know everyone’s workable hours – so how many hours per week are on their contract. You also need insight into the booked hours, both in the past and in the schedule for the future.
Which hours are billable?
You must then be able to distinguish which hours are billable. Working hours for the customer are of course billable, but hours for internal business operations such as meetings and administration are not. In addition, there are also other hours such as sick and holiday leave.
Mapping productivity
Let’s take Mark as an example. He works 40 hours a week and is scheduled for 40 hours next week. Of this, he spends 32 hours with customers, 4 hours with meetings and he needs 4 hours for his administration. That means that 32/40 = 80% of his hours are billable.
This way you can do that for every employee, internally and externally. With that data you can see who makes the largest contribution to the operating result. You can calculate this per day, per week and in the longer term. You can then group by department and job title to see which departments and job titles contribute the most and least.
How do you improve the productivity of your organization?
So with insight into your organization’s billable hours, you can see how much the different employees and departments contribute to the operating result. That insight then gives you a lot of tools to improve productivity.
Suppose, for example, that the cyber security team does not exceed 60% billable hours. This may mean that the organization is not getting enough projects and that it is therefore time for acquisition. In another case, it may happen that the cyber security consultants all have 110% billable hours and that this is also expected for the coming months. To limit overtime, you can recruit new consultants or outsource projects. Another solution could be to train understaffed employees so that they can absorb the additional work.
Another example is when 2 consultants are at 120% and others are at 70% – it’s simply a matter of redistributing the work. And if 1 consultant has been achieving a structurally low percentage lately, that can of course also be a signal that something is going on.
With an understanding of the utilization of your organization you have a tool to improve the productivity of your organization – now and for the future.
