Today’s hybrid work environment brings its own set of challenges.

Employees are seeking out new ways to effectively do their jobs, while adjusting to a world in which the lines of demarcation between home, work, and school have fundamentally blurred. Managers have to find new strategies for motivating their teams remotely—driving the corporate agenda, while staying connected enough to spot signs of burnout, or recognize when extra help is needed.

Having a tool to measure effort and performance can help combat all of these challenges. It gives employees a window into how they spend their time during the day, so they can actively work with their managers to focus their efforts where they add the greatest value.

For example, let’s say I’m an employee who consistently has to put in extra hours to get my work done. I know I’m that busy all of the time, but, at the end of the day, I really can’t tell you what I did or what I accomplished. All I know is that it was an action-packed day and I’m tired.

If I had access to a tool that measured my activity throughout the day, I could see that I spend about 50 percent of my time in meetings, and do a self-assessment. Did I have a voice in those meetings? Was my presence really necessary, or was I included out of habit, or professional courtesy? Could the meeting content have been more efficiently communicated via email and saved an hour of my day?

I now have the insight I need to have an objective conversation with my manager about how I’m spending my time, what I’m accomplishing, and how I can be more efficient—which, in this case, is opting out of non-essential meetings.

Using this software, employees have a tool to better understand their own work habits, and managers have a means to more effectively coach and engage with employees—regardless of whether they’re working remotely or two offices away.

The real power of the tool is the transparency—the fact that employee and manager are seeing the same data. It’s not one entity monitoring the other. It’s employee and manager working together, using real data to improve productivity, job satisfaction and outcomes.

We live in a world where we are constantly tracking everything we do. We get up in the morning and look at the fitness tracker on our wrists to check our sleep patterns, our heart rate, our oxygen levels, and how many miles we ran—or steps we took—the day before.

We are constantly monitoring and assessing ourselves because we want to get better.

A workforce productivity analytics tool gives us that same kind of feedback on our work performance. It’s a way to assess how we’re spending our time, what we’re accomplishing, and offers up the insight we need to get better—as employees, as managers and as a collective organization.