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How to Increase Operational Efficiency Using ActivTrak

Workforce analytics can help you get a clear picture of your remote workforce productivity, processes, and systems. This valuable data can help boost your team’s operational efficiency and improve results overall.

By Ramiz Khan

A man in a blue checkered shirt sits at a desk working from home on his laptop, and a typewriter to his left.

When your teams are working remotely, keeping track of projects and employee productivity can be challenging. But even while working remote, you can keep your focus on increasing operational efficiency. With ActivTrak, you can get a detailed view of employee processes and pain points when everyone is working offsite.

Our easy-to-use remote workforce analytics tools can help reveal a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not. This includes identifying bottlenecks in workflow processes, areas of unbalanced workload distribution, poor time management, and more. The resulting data insights can help your team boost their operational efficiency, optimize their performance, and improve business outcomes.

What Is Operational Efficiency?

As noted in our overview of operational efficiency, there’s a big difference between efficiency and productivity, even though many companies will use the two terms interchangeably. In the Harvard Business Review article “Great Companies Obsess Over Productivity, Not Efficiency,” Michael Mankins makes the distinction by defining productivity as doing more with the same, but efficiency is doing the same with less. Ultimately, operational efficiency is about making your business operations leaner.

In today’s challenging economic climate, increasing productivity might be as important as improving efficiency. But starting with efficiency helps you build a baseline, so you can trim costs and resources while still achieving the same, or better, outputs. By usingActivTrak’s remote workforce analytics tools, identifying roadblocks to operational efficiency is quick and easy.

Roadblocks to Operational Efficiency

Some of the barriers you and your team may face with improving operational efficiency can include::

  • Unbalanced workload capacity, where some employees are overburdened and others are low on things to do.
  • Inefficient or out-of-date software or internal systems Process confusion, resulting in unnecessary delays in task completion.
  • Uneven productivity spikes and lags that make project timelines unpredictable.
  • Websites and applications that are unproductive and distracting or, worse yet, pose security risks to your organization.

ActivTrak’s remote workforce analytics tools can help you identify pain points and take action to speed up operational efficiency. If you introduce new applications or processes, you can use ActivTrak to analyze and compare changes in productivity trends to weigh the effectiveness of these new implementations and where they may still need to be optimized. You can also review application and website usage reports to determine which applications are actually supporting your operations, and which may be redundant. This paves the way for a leaner allocation of software licenses and uncovers opportunities to trim overhead costs. In addition, you can proactively prevent security risks in your organization by blocking risky websites and apps, including automating alerts that notify employees who may be in violation of company policies.

Less Really Is More

You can leverage remote workforce analytics to promote operational efficiency immediately, in addition to building continual optimization processes that will improve your business long-term. ActivTrak makes it easy to identify employee productivity trends, level workforce capacities over different periods of time, and produce clean reports to share this data with executive stakeholders.

When you increase operational efficiency in your organization, you help your team reduce friction in faulty processes, improving not only productivity but employee satisfaction as well. With a clear picture of your employees’ productivity, you can implement changes that increase operational efficiency without incurring large costs or overtaxing your existing resources. You’ll help your people work smarter, not harder. Your team will appreciate that – and you’ll appreciate the results!

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