This blog was originally posted on activtrak.com
Having visibility into a team’s processes and projects is important to every manager. However, when you’re managing a remote team, visibility becomes even more critical. How can you guide your staff on priorities and deadlines when you aren’t sure what’s actually going on behind the scenes?
With remote workforces, simply getting work done isn’t enough. Inefficient processes become more problematic as employees are no longer in the same room and communication becomes more difficult or delayed. Managers also need to see how work is getting done. And that’s exactly what ActivTrak’s workforce analytics does.
Remote workforce analytics are a type of business intelligence that gives business leaders visibility into workflows, time usage and process bottlenecks. The data helps you manage productivity and mitigate risks, protecting your business, your customers and your employees.
There are numerous reasons why businesses of all sizes are rapidly adopting remote workforce analytics, but here are the top five:
5) Greater, More Reliable Engagement Insights
Some employees love working remotely and find themselves getting more things done without distractions like office snacks or water cooler chat. Others, however, might grow disengaged from work. Maybe they feel isolated from their colleagues. Maybe they’re frustrated with the work itself or suboptimal processes. Whatever the reason, they’re disconnecting and that’s going to cost your company.
According to LinkedIn, disengaged employees can cost their employers up to 34% of their salary – and on average, 17.2% of a company’s workforce is not engaged. However, with workforce analytics, you can analyze workload, and understand who is at risk of burnout or who doesn’t have enough work. A telltale sign of disengagement is being okay with doing nothing on company time.
Raising the visibility of your remote team’s activities and processes doesn’t just impact projects and productivity. It also directly impacts engagement, which in turn affects your bottom line.
4) Identifying and Stopping Process Problems
Because workforce analytics gives you a bird’s eye view of activity with granular context into workflows, you can see where things are running smoothly and pinpoint where bottlenecks exist. From there, you can easily dig deeper and determine whether issues are due to faulty processes, a lack of sufficient tools or a personnel problem.
Identifying employees who may be causing bottlenecks provides a great coaching opportunity for you and for the employee. The issue could be as simple as a need for more training or process clarification. By investing some time in these team members, you can resolves chronic issues and redirect their career trajectory, helping them perform better and become valuable contributors to your team.
3) Visibility into Cloud and Desktop Applications Usage
You may think your remote team has everything they need to perform their jobs successfully, but the applications and software they’re using might be creating more problems than they solve. Employees might find they need something else, like an additional communication tool, as an example. Conversely, your remote workforce might be spending too much time on applications or websites unrelated to their particular job functions, leading to decreases in productivity or quality of work.
Remote workforce analytics can help you with these challenges. The software makes it easy to set usage limits on specific apps or websites. You can also identify whether some software programs are redundant or not needed by everyone who has a license. This opens up opportunities for cost-savings in addition to improving operational processes.
2) More Balance, Less Burnout
A healthy workload is a good thing, but overflowing workloads are problematic. Want to see at a glance who on your remote team is at risk for burnout? With remote workforce analytics, you can see workload distributions across your teams, easily identifying where there are imbalances and creating opportunities to level workload capacity.
ActivTrak lets you analyze dashboards and reports that highlight which employees have too heavy of a workload, and which have too light workloads, allowing you to redistribute tasks and prevent burnout. You can also utilize these tools to recognize and reward hard working employees that are going above and beyond their responsibilities. Plus, you can leverage data from workforce analytics to support a proposal for raises or bonuses for highly productive employees.
1) Insights and Peace of Mind
Most important of all, as a manager, remote workforce analytics will offer you more peace of mind. With automatic alerts, the system will notify you immediately if an employee performs a risky action on their computer which introduces operational compliance risk. Plus, ActivTrak makes it easy to see real data and identify not only problems, but also highlight progress and team successes.
Want Even More Reasons?
There are many more reasons why your remote teams can benefit from increased visibility, but it’s always best to see for yourself, using your own remote workforce data.
Start a completely free ActivTrak account, or reach out to us today!
