FAM Brands is an award-winning wholesale apparel conglomerate that designs, manufactures and sells women’s and men’s sportswear and activewear apparel to brands globally. With over 60 factories around the world and hundreds of employees, the company needs to know how to equip employees to be their most productive while effectively managing its workforce headcount.
Overview
Challenge
The order management team at FAM Brands faced major bottlenecks and leadership wanted to find out why. Meanwhile, as remote work requirements from the COVID-19 pandemic eased, Head of Talent and Human Resources Kasey Konkright questioned whether bringing employees back to the office full-time was the best approach to ensure productivity.
Solution
FAM Brands tapped ActivTrak to deploy their productivity monitoring tool as a pilot test. Using ActivTrak, FAM Brands categorized employee digital activity as productive or unproductive work to provide insight into how much time they spent on certain tasks or activities. The company also implemented ActivTrak’s Personal Insights dashboard to help employees understand how they spent their time on focused, multi-tasking or collaboration activities, including meetings, chats and emails.
Employee productivity monitoring data helped me validate that people who work from home are more productive. Now, instead of pushing people to come back to the office, we’re actively hiring people from other states to work from home.
Kasey Konkright, Head of Talent and Human Resources
Results
Leveraging automation & training
Using ActivTrak, FAM Brands identified productivity bottlenecks in the order management team caused by manual tasks, such excessive time spent in Excel to complete tasks. The company found some team members working as much as 12 hours a day on low value activities. In response, FAM Brands implemented new training, introduced automation and ultimtely decided to expand the team’s headcount.
Uncovering unproductive meetings
After rolling out ActivTrak to its 500 employees, FAM Brands quickly discovered that too much time was spent in meetings that could be run more efficiently. The data not only confirmed the issue but also highlighted specific areas for improvement.
Validating remote work policies
ActivTrak revealed that employees were often more productive working remotely than in the office, reinforcing the company’s remote work policy. This shift allowed HR team to hire talent from new locations, greatly expanding FAM Brand’s talent pool. Through ActivTrak, FAM Brands also gave employees access to their own productivity data, enabling them to schedule their time more efficiently and have more informed discussions with managers about their tasks.
Communicating Wellness Benefits
FAM Brands expanded its employee wellness initiatives after using ActivTrak to identify common HR-related online searches, such as sick leave policies and mental health support. Recognizing a gap in communication, Konkrite and his team developed new strategies to ensure employees were better informed about available company benefits.
[ActivTrak] supports the notion that our employees are adults, and we trust them to do what they need to do. That means giving employees the flexibility to adjust their work schedules around family needs. Employee retention has increased since we employed ActivTrak.
