Why Workplace Analytics Deserves a Place in Your Tech Stack

Brought to you by ActivTrak

From the emotional exhaustion associated with the COVID-19 pandemic to the physical and mental fatigue caused by an often bumpy shift to a hybrid work environment, it’s no surprise employees in nearly every industry are feeling burned out.

Burnout can inspire exhaustion, disinterest, and reduced performance. But perhaps the biggest concern for organizations is that burnout, when left unchecked, can lead to employee turnover. In fact, 41% of the global workforce is likely to consider leaving their current employer within the next year, and 46% are planning to make a major pivot or career transition.

So what can organizational leaders do to prevent turnover in our digitally exhausted world? Implement a workforce analytics solution to gain a data-informed view of employee activity trends. 

Workforce Analytics

Workforce analytics technology can provide data-driven insights on employee engagement and productivity. These insights offer consistent, continuous measurement over time, giving leadership teams a significant advantage over traditional point-in-time surveys or subjective manager assessments. In fact, workforce analytics tools enable managers to make more informed decisions in near real-time to improve employee engagement.

Workforce analytics can also help track performance trends, identify workers subject to burnout risk, and identify how employees can reduce distractions. These insights help leadership teams work with managers to design more efficient workloads, workflows, and workdays for employees, and in turn, help employees recapture focus time for deep work and reduce unnecessary meeting time. These are just two ways workforce analytics enable employees to achieve greater productivity while simultaneously reducing the risk of turnover.

Here is a common set of key performance indicators to help organizations design positive work experiences for employees:

Alignment

Can an employee clearly identify and work toward the right goals, expectations, and workflows for their specific role within the organization?

Focus

Focus is about measuring employee engagement in regards to where they spend their time. Are they focused on important, high-value activities? Or are they spending more time on low-value tasks or distractions?

Effort

Are employees spending enough time, at the right time, on the right activities?

Capacity 

Do employees have the capacity to troubleshoot or take on new activities? To understand true capacity, organizational leaders need to have insight into an employee’s active and focused time.

Conversations

How much time is an employee spending collaborating with others?

Automation 

How much time is an employee spending on manual tasks? Understanding this could help determine if the employee’s job could be made easier (or more efficient) if various elements of the job were automated.

Process 

How many steps are required to complete a specific workflow? 

Rework 

Are individual workflows repeatedly being revised? 

Velocity 

How much time does it take to actually execute against a defined goal?

By leveraging a workforce analytics solution, organizational leaders can gain actionable insights around each of these KPIs and have a better understanding of employee activity trends. Equipped with this information, the leadership team can make more informed decisions around recognizing burnout early, how to make work easier through process improvements, and even if specific employees need training or mentoring. 

Selecting the Workforce Analytics Solution That’s Best For You

The tech stack is gaining increasing importance, and workforce analytics technologies are becoming a top consideration. When evaluating technologies to implement in your organization, look for a solution that is built with a focus on privacy, security and flexibility.

A cloud-based workforce analytics solution, for example, is easy to deploy and manage across a distributed workforce. Additionally, solutions built with an open architecture allow leadership teams to more easily integrate workforce analytics with other tools and data sources across the organization to achieve broader context. Also worth noting is that a secure solution should have multiple layers of protection including data encryption, single-sign-on, and multi-factor authentication.

Organizations that embrace workforce analytics will create more rewarding employee experiences, engaged and productive teams, and help retain their workforces for a stronger future. But to do this most effectively, leaders and organizational managers must prioritize insights, not oversights, to inspire open dialogue. This can only be done by building trust and designing engaging work experiences. 

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About ActivTrak

ActivTrak helps companies unlock productivity potential. Our award-winning workforce analytics and productivity management software provides expert insights that empower people, optimize processes, and maximize technology. Additionally, with data sourced from more than 9,000 customers and over 450,000 users, ActivTrak’s Workforce Productivity Lab is a global center for ground-breaking research and expertise that helps companies embrace and embody the future of work.