Article first appeared on HR.com.
In recent weeks, Amazon mandated that employees come to the office five days a week, and PwC UK announced they would track location data to ensure employees worked in the office three days a week.
The growing number of these big-name announcements can be unsettling for employees and CxOs alike as they weigh the risk-reward of similar policy changes to sustain their culture and competitive advantage. Labor and related expenses account for more than 70% of business spend. Yet, 83% of CxOs cannot measure the ROI of workforce investments.
For HR leaders, now is the time to identify key metrics that enable goal setting, track progress and highlight areas for improvement – ultimately driving efficiency, accountability and growth.
Workforce analytics that combine objective data with employee surveys and sentiment analysis give CHROs a powerful tool to enhance employee performance and engagement. This helps pinpoint where to focus efforts – through targeted training, coaching or resource reallocation – to empower employees and optimize productivity.
Objective workforce analytics also play a key role in aligning employee activities with broader company goals. With insights into how work gets done, leaders can address critical questions such as: How can we boost productivity? Increase capacity? Maximize return on investments? Improve margins? This data-driven approach helps CHROs make informed decisions that drive both individual and organization performance.
Three key strategies can help leaders effectively address these and other important questions:
Employee Monitoring: Are Teams Working as Expected?
Leaders can use workforce intelligence to gain detailed insights into work hours and task productivity, ensuring teams meet expectations. Monitoring attendance and policy adherence with both real-time and historical data allows them to proactively address gaps in shift coverage. Additionally, reconciling contractor hours worked with hours billed helps catch discrepancies and prevent overcharges, ensuring accurate compensation and budgeting.
Productivity Management: Are Teams Working and Collaborating to Maximize Results?
Taking it a step further, workforce intelligence can be used to understand and improve team performance, and inform alignment on daily activities and best practices – ensuring teams work toward shared goals. This also includes assessing employee utilization to detect early signs of burnout and adjusting workloads by redistributing tasks or adding resources to maintain engagement and sustain productivity.
Workforce Planning: Where Should We Adjust or Reallocate Workforce Investments?
Workforce analytics also help leaders analyze workload capacity, allowing them to allocate resources where they’re needed most and identify gaps in staffing. This process includes optimizing technology investments by identifying and eliminating unused software licenses, as well as ensuring real estate investments are right-sized based on actual utilization, employee attendance and productivity trends.
The Bottom Line
True workforce intelligence not only enhances decision-making, but also delivers tangible, measurable results. When implemented effectively, it leads to real ROI, where optimized workforce strategies directly impact company performance and revenue. Take the following example:
Upon reviewing employee productivity data, one company discovered that its employees were only productive for an average of six hours a day. Setting a goal to increase this to seven hours, the company unlocked an additional 112 hours of productive activity each day — equivalent to adding 14 full-time employees without increasing headcount. This resulted in a 10% increase in revenue per employee, from $250K to $275K.
To further improve margins, the company analyzed employee utilization metrics to identify burnout and attrition risks. By increasing the percentage of employees in the healthy utilization zone from 62% to 80%, they reduced turnover risk by 18%, saving an estimated $260,000 in attrition costs. Additionally, a deep dive into technology usage allowed the company to cut unnecessary software licenses, leading to further cost savings.
In today’s rapidly evolving workplace, CHROs have a unique opportunity to leverage workforce intelligence to drive meaningful change. By using objective data to monitor employee productivity, manage workloads and optimize resource allocation, they can address both short-term performance goals and long-term organizational success.
The ability to track key people metrics enables HR leaders to make smarter, data-driven decisions that not only enhance employee engagement, but also directly impact a company’s bottom line. As labor costs continue to account for the majority of business expenses, the ability to measure, analyze and act on workforce insights is no longer a nice-to-have—it’s a competitive advantage that every CHRO should harness.
