Enterprises have always had to navigate change and uncertainty. But never has that been truer than today. Businesses already navigating the challenges of hybrid work and return-to-office mandates are now standing on the brink of even greater workforce transformation in the age of generative AI.
To navigate today’s workforce challenges, prepare for tomorrow, and get ahead in a rapidly evolving world, businesses are turning to workforce analytics. In fact, the global workforce analytics market is expected to grow from $1.81 billion in 2023, to $4.78 billion by 2030.
Despite the industry’s meteoric rise, many enterprise leaders still have questions about what workforce analytics is and isn’t and how it can benefit their business. Let’s review a quick primer.
What is workforce analytics?
Workforce analytics is the process of measuring, reporting and analyzing employee and organizational data related to work patterns, habits, and productivity. Workforce analytics software collects user digital activity, including software usage and time spent in applications and meetings. This data provides visibility into individual activity time, team interactions, and aggregated workforce trends, revealing insights that help company leaders make informed decisions about how to optimize capacity, target training and professional development, optimize improve work patterns and increase an organization’s overall success.
Enterprises also use workforce analytics to better understand the work performed by contingent workforces. Visibility into the actual work performed by an outsourced team provides companies with an advantage in contract negotiations and unlocks significant cost-savings.
What workforce analytics is not:
Workforce analytics is not a replacement for real-life managers, and it does not supplant human decision-making. Instead, it is a business intelligence tool that may be used as a supplemental resource for insights- driven business leadership. It’s also not an application that “spies” on employees or collects personal information. Instead, it analyzes work patterns across an entire organization, helping leaders identify patterns and implement improvements for employees and teams. Enterprises gain additional value from a workforce analytics platform by providing employees access to their own data for self-improvement and development.
Key Benefits of Workforce Analytics
The benefits of reliable workforce analytics are vast and include improving efficiency, reducing unnecessary costs, improving employee wellbeing, and increasing engagement. Using an automated workforce analytics solution like Sapience VUE® also helps you manage remote and hybrid teams, as you can clearly understand how teams spend their time, identify inefficiencies, and receive actionable insights to increase productivity, reduce costs, and elevate engagement.
Workforce analytics can provide the following benefits to enterprise teams:
Better Workload Management
Are a few hardworking employees bearing the burden of an excessive workload, while other employees or departments have available capacity? Workforce analytics makes these patterns visible, giving managers the opportunity to evenly distribute work across teams. This can prevent burnout or attrition for overworked employees and increase engagement for workers who may be feeling underutilized.
Improved Employee Wellbeing
Employees who are answering work e-mails late at night or working long after the workday ends may feel overwhelmed and pressured. Workers with declining hours and engagement may be seeking new opportunities. Access to this kind of data can help company leaders proactively identify stress, burnout and attrition indicators, and implement strategies to improve workplace satisfaction and employee retention.
Stronger Employee Engagement
Gaining visibility into employee engagement is the first step toward improving it. Employees who are not engaged may need more training, education, development, or coaching.
Lower Costs
Data can reveal underused software licenses. Canceling these licenses can lead to significant cost-savings. Increased workforce visibility also enables enterprises to save money by better utilizing existing resources to avoid unnecessary hires.
Increased Productivity
Workplace analytics can be used to make organizational processes leaner, more efficient, and effective. Understanding how employees spend their time helps organizations create baselines for productivity, recognize high performers, and set benchmarks for better performance.
Consistent Performance Measurement
Measuring data on an ongoing basis gives you a clearer view into employee engagement and productivity over time and arms managers with data to provide meaningful employee feedback. This can help inform training and development programs, workforce planning and hiring.
Objective Performance Reviews
Workforce analytics provide managers with objective data with no bias for more fair and objective performance assessments. This also makes it easier to compare performance across teams and office locations.
A Culture of Transparency
Employees can access their own performance data, boosting transparency and accountability at every level. Ensuring transparency with employees and stakeholders is critical to your workforce analytics. Be clear about what information is being captured, why it is necessary, and how the data is being used.
Employee Privacy Protection
Sapience VUE has built-in features to protect employee privacy. For example, only work-related activity and URLs are captured, and employee time spent on non-work-related applications, activities or websites is simply marked as “private.”
Remote Work Flexibility
Workforce analytics provide transparency into work no matter where it happens—making flexible work arrangements more effective. This can improve work-life balance and increase access to larger talent pools.
Simplify Workforce Analytics with Sapience
Workforce analytics provide unparalleled clarity to company leaders—and solutions like Sapience VUE for enterprise workforces, and Sapience transparenSEE for contingent workforces, make it simple to implement the technology into your company’s existing workflows. Our newest Sapience solution, Whereabouts Work, automatically tracks, validates, and reports employee adherence to return-to-office policies. The easy-to-implement tool simplifies compliance for your enterprise, and your employees.
In short, Sapience intelligent data solutions enable you to better maximize your people, processes, and technology resources companywide. Our analytics deliver the information needed to drive confident decision-making around your organizational goals and priorities and keep up with the pace of change.
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