You Can’t Improve What You Don’t Measure: Using Workforce Analytics to Drive Productivity
Can you prove that your employees are productive and efficient?
The father of modern business management, Peter Drucker, is often attributed with a saying: “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 you are winning 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 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 its operations. Different roles will introduce their own layers 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’s 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 answers to these questions should lead you to metrics that are measurable over time. For example, if 80 percent of projects are completed on time and 20 percent require additional time, the resulting question should be: Why are 20 percent of projects going over schedule?
• Is it because the request is too demanding for your employees’ skill sets?
• 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 of 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 more 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. Turning the data into actionable objectives is another. ActivTrak’s workforce analytics 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 all love to brag about how our employees work like a collective well-oiled machine, employees are still human. That means healthy work habits and regular 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’ workflows 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 to work smarter, not harder.
Management teams can share this data using customized BI reports via ActivTrak’s Data Connect 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 and 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, then dive straight into real-time actionable insights that help improve your business outcomes.
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