using productivity analytics to measure and improve

© C O P Y R I G H T 2 0 2 0 4 5 1 R E S E A R C H . A L L R I G H T S R E S E R V E D.

C O M M I S S I O N E D B Y

O C T O B E R 2 0 2 0

Using Productivity Analytics to Measure and Improve Performance & Engagement

A B O U T T H E AU T H O R

C H R I S M A R S H

P R I N C I PA L R E S E A R C H A N A LY S T, WO R K F O R C E P R O D U C T I V I T Y & C O L L A B O R AT I O N

As Principal Research Analyst, Chris Marsh sets the vision for and

manages the Workforce Productivity and Collaboration practice at

451 Research, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence. The WPC

practice focuses on a broad range of enterprise software including

technologies supporting workforce planning, project and work

management, collaboration, content and innovation management,

learning and skilling and content creation. The team also covers the

full spectrum of HR technologies from candidate marketing and

recruitment through core HR processes and out to new types of

employee engagement tool.

2C O M M I S S I O N E D B Y AC T I V T R A K


S P EC I A L R E P O R T | U S I N G P R O D U C T I V I T Y A N A LY T I C S TO M E A S U R E A N D I M P R OV E P E R F O R M A N C E & E N G AG E M E N T

IntroductionMany businesses are plagued with ‘strategic debt’ – the gap between their strategic goals and

their ability to execute against them operationally. The root cause is commonly the pervasive daily

friction most employees experience across their tools and workflows. Only one in two employees reported being routinely very productive in our Voice of the Enterprise: Workforce Productivity

& Collaboration, Employee Engagement 2019 survey. A wide estate of siloed applications

multiplies these basic problems many times over — such as finding and sharing information, creating meaningful workflows, context switching between apps, fragmented reporting and weak governance.

This year has also brought new operational challenges that further obscure best-practice

productive behaviors — mass remote working, rapidly changing business priorities and

technologies, and workforce reductions. It’s no surprise then that businesses are looking for

ways to get a handle on this and be more systematic in understanding and perpetuating the

specific behaviors that lead their employees to be more productive. In this paper, we examine why this has become a transformation priority and where productivity analytics can offer support,

and we detail a metric framework that could help operationalize those analytics.

Key Findings • This year, many businesses have had to rethink their operational baselines, how they measure

employee productivity and the outcomes they’re aiming for because of the disruptions wrought

by the coronavirus pandemic.

• Our Voice of the Enterprise: Workforce Productivity & Collaboration, Work Execution Goals & Challenges 2020 survey found that twice as many (47%) employees feel their performance has

been negatively impacted by the circumstances surrounding the pandemic compared with those

who felt their performance has improved (22%).

• We believe this will have long-term implications for tools and technologies used for work: 92% of

technology decision-makers are rethinking their longer-term workforce technology strategies in

response to the coronavirus outbreak – 35% very significantly so – according to a custom client survey we conducted in May.

• As businesses look to optimize processes and identify and reinforce positive work behaviors,

some are turning to productivity analytics tools where daily data-informed signals from

employees’ applications are used to spot friction and identify improvements.

• There is a set of common usage and activity insights that organizations can apply to the context

of business outcomes such as improved productivity, engagement and operational agility.



Addressing Everyday Friction Has an Outsized ImpactThere is growing recognition that people are an organization’s most valuable asset, and that

when they are treated as such you get happier employees who are more engaged in their work

and who, as a result, deliver improved business outcomes. The reasons why are clear. Employees

that are intrinsically engaged in their work take the responsibilities of their role more seriously;

are more likely to be motivated to generate new ideas about how best to do their work; find it easier when necessary to positively diverge from established plans to adapt and find new routes forward; are more personally invested in amplifying their employers’ brand within their social

circle and in professional forums; and are also more likely to stay in their role and not look to

move to a new company.

For all of these reasons, more businesses are investing in ‘employee experience’ initiatives that

are centered not on the traditional HR perspectives of company values and compensation,

but on an engaging work execution culture – the combination of work tools, arrangements,

policies and behaviors that together define how productive the workforce is. This is important for employees, too – in our Voice of the Enterprise: Workforce Productivity & Collaboration,

Employee Engagement 2019 survey, 42% of employees said that enjoying their day-to-day

work contributes most to their overall happiness and engagement at work; it ranked higher than

compensation, alignment of values with their employer and career opportunities.

Investing in this kind of culture can lead to employees being more productive on a daily basis.

When employees feel more focused and productive, they may also feel more positive about

other parts of their experience – it can create a halo effect. It doesn’t, however, work anywhere

near as strongly the other way around — if employees experience a demotivating daily grind,

then any recognition or compensation they receive, as well as opportunities for advancement or

alignment between their and their employer’s brand, are unlikely to make up for it. As employees,

we intuitively understand this. Productivity is weakened when we feel disinterested in our work.

More businesses are coming to realize that being productive and engaged are two sides of the

same coin, and that providing the tools and technologies to elevate employees’ day-to-day

experiences of getting their work done can yield strong improvements in both.



Businesses Want Insights Into Productive Behaviors This year has brought new disruptions for businesses that want to engender a positive culture

of continuous productivity improvement. Our Voice of the Enterprise: Workforce Productivity & Collaboration, Work Execution Goals & Challenges 2020 survey found that twice as many (47%) employees feel their performance has been negatively impacted by the circumstances

surrounding the pandemic compared with those who felt their performance has improved (22%).

Remote work has effectively exposed how many workflows are stitched together based on assumptions, tradition and convention, and reinforced by in-person conversations and meetings.

Many of those band-aids are no longer present, revealing workflows and behaviors that weren’t ever particularly effective – and are even less so in the new remote work context.

The quick fix of more virtual conversations isn’t the answer to keeping employees productive and agile. Instead, businesses are looking for more systematic and predictable ways to understand

and manage their employees’ effectiveness – taking the indicators of productivity from digital

signals from the applications they use and converting them into operational improvements.

This provides a strong rationale for productivity analytics tools that can provide insights around

application activities for managers and individual employees to identify workflow pain points, measure employee productivity across those workflows, and ultimately better design and manage important work.



Workforce Analytics Shift Focus to ProductivityMany businesses already use some kind of monitoring tool to mitigate perceived negative

behaviors such as the time employees spend on social media. That may still be a useful

approach to ensure certain compliance safeguards are met. It doesn’t, however, speak to the

more strategic opportunity for productivity analytics – supporting businesses as they invest

to become more operationally agile, empowering teams to own specific business outcomes and providing them with the analytics to inform how they should design their work to execute

against those outcomes.

Figure 1: More Applications Means More Intelligent Signals to Improve Workforce Productivity

Source: 451 Research, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence

There is a range of benefits and beneficiaries when looking at productivity analytics in this way. Application owners, frontline and team managers, and individual employees would all benefit from data-informed insights supporting more meaningful conversations around how to reduce

time spent on unproductive activities, identify and reduce knowledge gaps, streamline their

work, sharpen their focus and keep aligned with their colleagues. For many businesses, that’s

currently guesswork. By putting data in employees’ hands, there is a much firmer basis for decision-making and potentially a powerful catalyst to making employees feel invested in their

work on a day-to-day basis.

BUSINESS APPLICATION EVOLUTION WORKFORCE ANALYTICS EVOLUTION

Functional and

application-centric

Business outcome and

employee-centric

Compliance and

application-centric

Specialized Collaborative Integrated Intelligent Diagnostic Visibility Monitoring

SaaS explosion

of functional-

specific apps

giving better

versions of

legacy

workflows

Prebuilt

integrations and

open APIs

allowing new

data sharing

and workflows

across systems

Automated usage

and activity insights

applied to the context

of business outcomes

such as improved

productivity,

engagement, and

operational agility.

Apps become

more social

allowing

improved

sharing,

collaboration and

new workflows.

Insights to

diagnose

workflow

inefficiencies to

plan for

improvements

Compliance-

focused

mitigation of

perceived

negative

behaviors

Deeper

assessment of

activities

undertaken

across more of

the application

estate



Anyone involved in strategic workforce management such as HR and other executive leadership

could also use that data as inputs for creating effective employee experience and company

culture policies. It would also, vitally, help with employee onboarding – our Voice of the Enterprise:

Workforce Productivity & Collaboration, Employee Lifecycle & HR 2020 survey found 42% of

employees saying it took them as long as six months to start adding value in their job. This is

particularly significant given some evidence of a correlation between success at the onboarding stage and longer-term value delivered by employees over their full tenure.

Figure 2: Understanding Key Indicators of Productivity Is Important to Supporting a Culture of Continuous Im-

provement That Can Lead to Better Business Outcomes

Source: 451 Research, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence

Focus Rework Automation Effort

BUSINESS OUTCOMES

A culture of continuous improvement with the right real-time data to reduce time spent on

unproductive activities, identify and reduce knowledge gaps, streamline work, sharpen focus,

drive alignment, and promote the workforce’s productivity and engagement.

WORKFORCE PRODUCTIVITY METRICS

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

Having the right data to regularly reflect on

behaviors, processes and workflows supporting

the quick re-design and continuous automation

of work and the creation of benchmarks to

identify, promote and perpetuate the most

effective productive behaviors.

CULTURE OF IMPROVEMENT

A culture of autonomy with employees provided

the data to have informed and purposeful

conversations to improve decisions around how

to support ownership over and execution

towards specific business outcomes.

OPERATIONALIZING

WORKFORCE

PRODUCTIVITY

METRICS

Velocity Alignment Capacity Collaboration Process



Key Indicators of Productivity to Drive Actionable ImprovementsThere are different ways that businesses define and measure productivity, often contingent on the type of employee, the nature of their work and the intended outcomes. From the perspective

that every employee uses a range of different applications to get their work done, however, there

is a common set of metrics that businesses can use to measure and improve the productivity of

their teams.

METRIC DEFINITION RATIONALE

ALIGNMENT Alignment around the right goals, expectations and workflows.

A rise in cross-functional, collaborative and remote work, and often growing application estates, mean that the ability of employees to align and focus on their goals is even more important than before.

EFFORT Spending enough time, at the right time, on the right activities.

Context is becoming increasingly important in effective work, with employees needing to ensure they are focused on the right activities at the right time.

CAPACITY Having capacity beyond active and focused time to troubleshoot and take on net new activities.

To prevent burnout, respond to unexpected demands and empower innovation, employees need to understand their capacity to take on new work.

COLLABORATION The time spent collaborating. Businesses commonly struggle with having a meeting culture, which unfortunately has worsened for many under remote work. Understanding the timing and length of conversational interactions is important to optimize both that time and time spent on more structured work.

AUTOMATION The amount of time spent on manual tasks.

Manual tasks may be important, but generally process optimization focuses on automating away manual tasks where possible.

PROCESS The number of steps to complete a workflow.

Either too few or too many steps in business workflows and processes can erode employees’ productivity, so understanding how they move through workflows can help optimize their design.

FOCUS The number of times employees switch between their different applications.

Context switching across a wide and diverse range of applications can be highly disruptive, and detract from focus on and achieving other metrics. Identifying when, where and how it’s unproductive can help drive new behaviors.

REWORK The number of times individual workflows are revised and amended.

In a culture of continuous improvement, significant time can be spent revising and reiterating workflows. That may be necessary, but knowing how fluid workflows are can be important to establishing operational baselines.

VELOCITY The time it takes to execute against a goal.

As businesses look to be more operationally agile and responsive to new market and competitive dynamics, the more important it is to cultivate velocity of work.



ConclusionsThe realization is growing – businesses are increasingly recognizing that by providing day-to-

day experiences that empower employees to fulfill their productive potential, they will be able to generate the kinds of innovation in work practices and behaviors that allow them to thrive in

the digital age. This has made space for tools and technologies that help businesses understand

how their workforce operates, where distracting and wasteful practices exist, how organizational

practices and structures impact behaviors, and what are the right baselines for effective

operational processes.

Giving employees continuous data-informed signals around how they can develop more positive work behaviors can improve employees’ engagement, which has a positive impact on

productivity and business outcomes. In an age where more businesses are looking for increased

operational agility to counter new disruptions and respond to new opportunities, this positive

feedback loop is sorely needed.

C O N T E N T P R OV I D E D B Y:



About ActivTrak

ActivTrak: Workforce Analytics for Productivity Insights

Workplace operations have changed significantly over recent months. As organizations settle into new ways of doing things, they must rethink what high-performance teams look like, as well as define and evaluate new performance metrics and outcomes. ActivTrak’s workforce productivity and analytics platform, combined with the Productivity Lab, helps organizations leverage data from people, processes, and technology to unlock the productivity potential in the modern workplace.

The ActivTrak Platform

The cloud-based user activity monitoring platform collects and analyzes data to help mid-market enterprises be more productive and compliant. With more than 7,500 customers and over 100,000 users of its Free version, ActivTrak’s award-winning solution can be configured in minutes to provide immediate visibility and insights that help employees and employers improve workplace productivity.

Named PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice, ActivTrak collects and analyzes data across people, process and technology to help organizations quickly answer questions like:

• Are teams aligned and making progress towards goals?

• Which apps and websites are leveraged most frequently by team, role or employee?

• Who might be on the verge of burnout?

• How engaged are employees?

• What are the success patterns of top employees?

• What are the top distractions across the team?

• What bottlenecks are present across process and technology?

• Where are potential compliance risks?

Learn More• Get started with a Free

ActivTrak account

• Watch a product demo

• Visit the Productivity Lab

http://activtrak.com/productivity-lab

https://activtrak.com/demo-experience/

http://activtrak.com/productivity-lab

About 451 Research451 Research is a leading information technology research and advisory company focusing

on technology innovation and market disruption. More than 100 analysts and consultants pro-

vide essential insight to more than 1,000 client organizations globally through a combination of

syndicated research and data, advisory and go-to-market services, and live events. Founded in

2000, 451 Research is a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence.

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using productivity analytics to measure and improve

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