Organizations worldwide are eagerly adopting workforce analytics. It has opened doors to better understanding and renders a firm grip on business and productivity even in a fast-growing WFH environment. Despite the buzz around work activity analytics and its incredible benefits, we’ve barely scratched the surface to experience its full benefits. The good news is that the number of organizations embracing work analytics tools is growing considerably.

The raging pandemic has forced us to rethink work and gear up swiftly for the new normal. Yet, as per Deloitte’s report, only 56% of organizations have embraced automation, while a good 72% are yet, to leverage automation’s benefits. Individual accountability and transparency are more important than ever in a rapidly evolving work culture. Unprecedented visibility into workplace patterns, productivity, governance, and compliance is what organizations are looking for. Work activity analytics tools provide this and more to maintain agility and a competitive edge irrespective of whether people are working remotely or at the workplace.

The global pandemic has underlined the importance of analytical capabilities to realize business goals in the current environment. Suddenly, organizations are feeling their epochal impact on business. As per a recent Sisense survey that involved 460 professionals from Australia and New Zealand, a whopping 67% of respondents believed BI and analytics programs were critical for daily operations, while 55% of organizations were now leveraging data sources, analytics, and dashboards more often.

The pandemic has compelled organizations to evaluate their analytics measures to see if they utilize real-time contactless data most effectively. Simply put, work activity analytics is all about how effectively you engage with your people, how efficiently you employ business processes, and how well you adopt new technologies. It’s how teams and departments collaborate and work in tandem. Work analytics can offer incredible insights into the past and the future and help predict operational outcomes.
Here are a few things you can achieve with work analytics.

Work analytics solutions come with Insights that tell you how resources are allocated, the amount of time spent on varied activities, including meetings, emails, sales activities, resolving issues, etc. This helps identify inefficiencies as well as makes more significant room for improvement. When you understand how a typical week looks, you can better understand issues and grievances and prevent burnouts. The rationale behind employing work analytics tools is to create a win-win for both organizations and employees to streamline activities and tasks that leave employees motivated and focused. Decision-makers are better positioned to analyze the work habits that help some departments be more productive than others. Work analytics reports tell you precisely how teams communicate and help you develop a realistic estimate of the dollar value of time spent on each activity. So if you want to calculate the average hourly rate of FTEs, voila, you got it.

The success of an organization often boils down to how happy its employees are. Usually, it’s up to the respective managers to motivate their teams, engage with them daily, respond to requests and individual issues, and create an inclusive environment for their teams. Typically, 1:1s, skip-level meetings, 6-month check-ins are all good habits to cultivate at the workplace. Work activity analytics can gauge employee well-being at work by looking into the ways teams collaborate and mitigate the risk of collaborative overload.
There has to be a right balance between individual focused work and time spent collaborating for effective time management. While meetings are necessary to better understand and make decisions by consensus, analytics can help identify unhealthy meeting habits that can negatively affect productivity and engagement. For instance, frequent recurring meetings, double-booked meetings, long meetings, large meetings with rather long durations can indicate a lack of autonomy or underutilized time.

For a team to enjoy inclusivity, everyone must get rightful access to key meetings, projects, and individuals within the organization. Work activity analytics data helps determine important work events within a team and keep a tab on shared documents, projects, and emails by allocating weightage to seniority, responsibility, and role. This ensures equal and enthusiastic participation of different demographic groups to learn, grow, and evolve.

Agility, a critical factor in having better business outcomes, occurs when best practices are followed and resources are equally available. So if we have to compare the performance of two teams, it is fair to do so only when both teams get the same time, automation, and support. If, despite standardization, one team can deliver faster than the other, clearly there are bottlenecks in communication, collaboration, requirement analysis, or some other department that needs immediate resolution.

All in all, there’s a lot to look forward to with work activity analytics solutions at the helm of business operations. The focus is on leveraging insights and tools to drive business strategy while offering a better employee experience. While doing so, it is essential to be human in these digitally-driven times.
As Rohit Singla, Chief Evangelist at Sapience Analytics, explains, “The Sapience Vue solution provides a factual data-driven view of workforce (employee and contingent) effort without invading their privacy – providing an enlightened approach to remote work management. Sapience Vue works without the use of intrusive surveillance tactics such as screen scraping, keystroke capture, location tracking, or video recording.”

Transform your work activity with Sapience

Sapience Analytics is here to help you grow your business with actionable insights and data-driven strategies. Our next-gen enterprise analytics tool Sapience Vue is just what you need to strike a balance between effort and outcomes.
Request a demo to know how to improve your enterprise’s work element to drive operational outcomes successfully with real-time analytics.