Can you prove that your employees are productive and efficient? The father of modern business management, Peter Drucker, said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” On the surface, the quote seems obvious. Without goal posts, how will you know if you’re winning? But… it goes deeper than that. Even if you are winning, do you know why and how to learn from your wins?
The latter question gets to the heart of the matter: what parts of your business are leading to your desired results and how can you use that data to improve overall operational efficiency? Using workforce analytics software can help lead to better employee and workforce productivity outcomes.
Business Goals You Can Measure
Every business will have unique goals and processes that build up their operations. Different roles will introduce their own layer of complexity and what works for one company may not work for another. How should a company measure its productivity?
There are a few baseline questions you can ask to help contextualize your business’ productivity and begin tracking your workforce analytics. Start by asking yourself the following:
- How much time is invested into every customer?
- Are projects being completed on time?
- Where are employees spending most of their work hours?
- How much time are employees investing in communicating with each other?
The answer to these questions should lead you to answers that are measurable over time. For example, 80% of projects are completed on time and 20% require additional time. The resulting question should be: why are 20% of projects going over schedule?
- Is it because the request is too demanding for your employees’ skillsets?
- Are current tools or resources insufficient for business needs?
- Are there unnecessary roadblocks created by rules or policy?
- Where are the gaps in productivity?
While it’s important to keep track and up-to-date on all of your data points, you’ll also want to automate most, if not all of the processes, and focus on the actionable items that directly affect your outcomes. ActivTrak can help you gain a clear understanding of how work is performed and where processes can be improved with detailed workforce analytics.
How ActivTrak’s Workforce Analytics Helps You Measure Goals and Drive Productivity
ActivTrak’s workforce analytics software provides insights on productivity patterns for better-informed management decisions that directly impact business goals. The software allows you to classify certain activities as either productive or unproductive and track how often employees engage with these activities. You’re also able to add new categories to work tools employees use which makes productivity analysis more meaningful to your particular business.
Workforce Analytics Creates Learning and Coaching Opportunities
Understanding your data is only one aspect of optimizing operations and outcomes. Putting the data into actionable objectives is another. ActivTrak’s workforce analytics software helps managers identify which employees are highly productive, and which employees might need some coaching. Reviewing this data regularly can highlight more efficient ways to get work done by raising important questions such as:
- What is the benchmark for our most productive employees?
- Who are our top performers, and what behaviors do they exhibit that can be replicated?
- Where are lower performing employees getting stuck?
Often the answer is some combination of issues with tools, workflow, lack of information, communication or collaboration gaps. Each of these can be uncovered and made actionable with the help of workforce analytics.
Workforce Analytics to Better Manage Downtime
As much as we love to brag about how our employees work like a well-oiled machine, employees are still human – and that means healthy work habits with breaks are necessary. If you’re finding overworked employees in your teams, review break times and working hours patterns to see how they may impact productivity and well-being.
If taking breaks is a challenge for some employees, ActivTrak has pop-up messages you can set that remind employees to take breaks after extended periods of continued work. This helps incorporate healthy work patterns into your employees’ workflow without becoming disruptive.
Workforce Analytics Helps Drive Teamwork
The data revealed by workforce analytics can be shared with employees to help them understand their individual productivity levels, and identify areas where they can improve. Remember, if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. At ActivTrak, we find employees embrace the idea of seeing their own productivity trends and take the initiative to self-improve when given the opportunity in order to work smarter, not harder.
Management teams can share this data using customized BI reports via ActivTrak’s ActivConnect and get the most critical business information quickly. These personalized dashboards can be segmented by individual employees, roles and departments to help teams analyze effectiveness and drive better engagement.
Businesses can gain better engagement from employees by measuring and sharing workforce productivity analytics using insights to drive actionable plans. Manually logging and reviewing productivity information is limited by the complexity of everyone’s roles and challenges. Instead, use ActivTrak’s workforce analytics to collect and analyze your productivity data and dive straight into real-time actionable insights that help accomplish improve your business outcomes.
