Workplace analytics vendors focus on how, not if, employees are working

There’s a backlash to “bossware,” and the important question for workplace-analytics vendors and the employers who buy them is increasingly not, “Are my employees working?” but “Who are they working with?”

While no particular tool stands out in the packed field of digital-workplace products designed to better understand the employee, some organizations are finding value in tech that demonstrates how employees are collaborating.

“I think that the most valuable insight that can be gained from these tools is a kind of an ongoing measurement of employee engagement,” said Lane Severson, a senior director analyst at market-intelligence firm Gartner. “We know that employee engagement and employee attrition levels are closely aligned. And we can save a lot of money for organizations if we can bring down the number of people that are leaving their jobs on an annual basis.”

Gartner defines the field of technologies that gain insight on workers’ digital activities as “workstyle analytics”:

• Employee productivity monitoring tools use invasive tactics such as time checks and audio/video observations to provide reports.
• Workplace analytics focus on team patterns rather than individual behaviors, and some of the vendors, such as Microsoft, Humanyze, and ActivTrak, want to emphasize that point: “We don’t capture webcam images. We don’t do keystroke logging,” said Mark Ralls, CEO of ActivTrak.
• Organizational network analysis (ONA) tools analyze relationship patterns. Vendors include OrgMapper, Polinode, and TrustSphere.

“They’re all using essentially the same information. They just need to start asking better questions and giving us better actions to take on those questions. And we’re not there yet,” said Severson, adding that vendors are looking for a future payoff in the space in the next 12 to 18 months and workstyle-tech adoption is somewhere between 5% to 10%.

Those “better questions” may lie in collaboration.

ONA ownin’. ONA tools identify collaboration patterns and answer questions such as Who’s engaging with whom? Who’s making the most connections?

In ONA, one clump of dots and another clump of dots—with no arrow in between—may spell silo and a need to push joint projects.

Anita Csoma, a freelance senior transformation advisor, used OrgMapper previously in her work with gas company MOL Group to see how information moved between technical experts as well between company hierarchies. Maybe middle management communicates with the team leaders, but the communication arrow isn’t pointing both ways.

“We were able to actually zoom in and see how for example, which of the disciplines collaborates most? Are they the engineers or the geoscientists?” Csoma told IT Brew.

Great performance. Performance-management platforms also provide helpful understanding of hidden collaboration.

J.D. Slaughter, group vice president for organizational development and effectiveness at the design-services company Huge, uses the people-services software Lattice to log regular one-on-one interactions, revealing an overall picture of engagement.

“Not being able to see quite literally how people are collaborating, how they interact, how they solve problems, physically, has I think had a more significant impact on our manager and leadership cadre and their culture than perhaps we were anticipating when the pandemic first started,” Slaughter said. “And now [we are] able to look into the platform and say, ‘Well, we know that not only are these individuals having one-on-ones with their managers and tracking them in the system, we can also see that they're having them with their peers.’”

Kimberly Lanier, a director in the people advisory and organizational change segment at the consultancy Protiviti, suggested asking questions that identify bottlenecks: Where are processes not understood? What roles are unclear?

“You’re going to see more gains than simply implementing a piece of software that tells you how many keystrokes somebody accomplished in a given day,” Lanier said.