HR’s responsibilities have evolved over the past two decades to include ensuring employee wellness, elevating managerial capabilities, and cultivating a positive company culture in addition to traditional responsibilities around managing company policies, employment practices, benefits, and compensation.
With these much welcomed changes, HR metrics also need to expand to provide a more holistic view of organizational health so that HR practitioners can better perform in their new roles. Workforce productivity analytics, a branch of the broader workforce analytics software category, helps HR take a data-driven approach to supporting a healthy and productive workplace while minimizing disruption to employees, avoiding self-reported biases, and perhaps most importantly, identifying issues before they impact the business.
Why Productivity Measurement is Essential
According to a 2020 study by the Brandon Hall Group, HR leaders rated productivity second among eight top indicators of increased employee engagement, with 80% selecting it as the most important factor. However, only 8% of respondents stated that they were measuring workplace productivity in their own organization, ranking it last among a list of 12 other engagement and HR metrics.
Productivity measurement doesn’t have to be hard, and it can (and should) be done in a transparent, collaborative way that promotes trust with employees. Workforce productivity analytics is not about surveillance or tracking but rather about the insights that can be gathered from the digital user activity in today's modern workplace. When analyzed, this data can provide leading indicator insights into how time is spent, how teams interact, how technology is used and how employees can improve focus, all helping to answer the bigger question “How can productivity and organizational health be improved?”.
How Workforce Productivity Analytics Empowers HR Leaders
Insights from a workforce productivity solution augment other HR metrics and provide a more complete picture of organizational health. With this data, HR can better support the organization with:
- Data-driven views of employee engagement that provide consistent, continuous measurement over time versus point-in-time surveys or potentially subjective manager assessments
- Visibility and consistent measurement of productivity across teams and departments to facilitate workforce planning discussions and talent acquisition strategies
- Ability to identify employees or teams at risk of burnout so managers and leadership can address workloads and resourcing before experiencing costly employee turnover
- Insights to support a culture of continuous productivity improvement, empowering leaders to share aggregate data and involve employees in brainstorming and piloting feasible solutions
Supporting Transparent Leadership & Company Culture
The future of work is about transparency, open communication, collaboration, and leadership response. Lengthy and self-reported survey processes, untimely data, and complex organizational reporting requirements have made the experience of measuring and improving employee engagement and other HR metrics costly, and the data questionable, which makes the job of HR that much more difficult.
The insights from a workforce productivity analytics platform enable unbiased decision-making based on actual employee behavior. Using data as the foundation for identifying obstacles and devising solutions takes the potentially harmful personalization element out of the equation. Workforce productivity data enables HR leaders to bring greater awareness to the relationship between people, process, and technology so that team members can remain productive, efficient, engaged, and focused on achieving their goals.
About ActivTrak
ActivTrak is a workforce productivity and analytics software company that helps teams understand how people work, whether in-office or remote. Our cloud-based user activity monitoring platform collects and analyzes data and provides insights to help organizations be more productive and operationally efficient. With more than 8,500 customers and over 250,000 users of its free version, ActivTrak’s award-winning solution can be configured in minutes to identify operational bottlenecks, flag operational compliance risks, and provide valuable insights that help employees and employers improve productivity outcomes. Sign up for a free account in minutes, no credit card required.
