Data is an inherent component of understanding your team’s performance. Learning how to harness will go a long way to determining your organization’s success. 

Data is everywhere in business. It’s an invaluable source for greater insights into team performance. 

The challenge is that every second of the workday generates millions of points of data. This sheer amount of data can be overwhelming, especially if you’re unsure how to process and interpret it.  

If you’re sitting on a goldmine of data, or looking to capture it in more detail, let’s dive into how you can make sense of it to improve your team’s productivity. And, just as important, avoid getting overwhelmed. 

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How to Get the Most Out of Your Productivity Data

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Make Sure That You Have the Right Tools for Collecting Data

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Subjectively evaluating your team’s performance can cause you to overlook various issues that may be hindering productivity. This is why it’s important to use data to evaluate performance objectively. 

The first step to take if you want to learn how to evaluate productivity is to seek out the proper software to track employee productivity. Tech plays a crucial role in your ability to gather and analyze your data. If you don’t have the right tools from the outset, you’ll undercut the quality of your data. 

But what should you be looking for when seeking out the best productivity apps for teams? As a starting point, you’ll want to make sure you have one ‒ or multiple ‒ tools that enable you to capture the following data: time spent on tasks, attendance, activity on websites or tasks, which websites are most productive, and beyond. 

Once you have the ideal workplace productivity tools for your needs, you’ll be able to build a strong foundation of quality data. From there, you’ll be able to draw insights and make conclusions with confidence in your data.

Connect Available Data With Business Intelligence Tools

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Business intelligence tools help you collect and process large amounts of data with ease. Once you have set up your software to track employee productivity and collect data, you can then sort through it using business intelligence tools to create reports and visuals, and see your data at a glance. 

Using business intelligence tools in combination with your employee monitoring and productivity trackers lets you draw out even deeper data insights and connect it with data from other parts of your business. Of course, the impact of business intelligence tools goes beyond just productivity. 

With business intelligence tools, you can: 

• Develop performance benchmarks and dive deeper into historical data to evaluate organizational progress
• Confidently make data-driven company decisions based on data collected across multiple departments
• Enhance the employee experience by making this data available to everyone rather than only making it accessible to your IT department
• Know that the applications you rely on are effectively collecting and evaluating data with minimal chance for error
• Access fast, real-time data with ease

Business intelligence tools also help you collect and track data across your organization. Whether you’re tracking data related to sales, human resources, finance or from other parts of your business. 

If you don’t already have a business intelligence tool in your organization, the reasons above illustrate why it’s a crucial tool to have. 

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Host Your Data On-Premise on Your Private Network

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Data security is a major concern for all organizations. For hybrid teams made up of a more flexible and mobile workforce, it comes with some added complexity. 

On premise hosting is an increasingly popular choice for companies who want to gain the highlest level of data control and most forcibly combat the risk of data breaches.

Securing data in-house can be more cost effective at scale, keeps your data secured on your own networks, and gives you full control over any backups that you make. 

Having full control of your data means you can get more out of it. Especially when it comes to productivity. It means, with the right internal network structures, that you can better ensure the quality of your data.

Then, with data quality assured and with it readily accessible, your team can mine, analyze and interpret the data more efficiently. And the net result is elevated data insights about your team’s productivity.

That being said, making the decision to use in-house servers does require you to have dedicated space for the equipment as well as an IT team who understands how the system works. 

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Give Employees Access to Their Productivity Data

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Data allows you to boost the productivity of your organization and is great for giving your employees feedback on their performance. 

Once you have the productivity data for each individual, be transparent with your employees and offer them access to their performance data. This will help you both understand where their strengths lie, why they may not be hitting their KPIs, and what solutions can be employed to boost their personal productivity. 

Sharing productivity with employees also does big things for trust, engagement, and relationships. Simply, when employees feel part of the process, they take on a greater sense of ownership.

As you continue to work with them and supply them with this data, you and your team can work towards continuous performance improvement together. 

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Segment Your Data 

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Productivity is complicated, and many different factors play a role in the effectiveness of an individual or team when you begin evaluating data from your group productivity app. 

This is why it’s crucial that you segment your data to better understand the productivity of every individual or team. Some helpful questions to ask yourself include: 

• Where is this employee located? (in-office or remote)
• What type of work are they doing? 
• What is the average time it takes other employees to complete this task? 
• What does team performance look like? Does this performance meet our KPIs?
• Which tasks are seeing the least performance? Why? 

Although segmentation may require some extra sophistication, it’s essential to look into every possible factor to assess your data effectively and make the necessary changes to the way your organization works.

Segmenting your data based on location, roles, tasks and more lets you define and understand productivity in a more meaningful way. Fortunately, with the right software to track employee productivity, much of this segmentation happens automatically. And, once it has collected enough data, you can use the questions above to begin sorting through it. 

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Benchmark Your Data and Compare It Over Time to Identify Trends

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At first, your data will only reveal your team’s performance as it is. However, over time, you can benchmark and compare data across categories like time periods, the types of tasks being done, or the employees doing the work, to identify trends in performance. This will help you figure out how to improve productivity. 

Once you’ve discovered these trends using your workplace productivity tools, it’s just a matter of problem-solving and finding the solution to improve these stats. There could be a need for more training, extra resources, or a more flexible work schedule that allows people to work when most productive. 

Over time, you can use trends in your data for implementing productivity improvement programs that systemize the ways in which you address productivity dips or bottlenecks.

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Keep Your Data Safe

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It’s natural to be concerned about the security and safety of your data. This is especially true if you’re working with employees who are taking equipment out of the office or doing work on their personal devices. 

Ensure your data is safe by using secure storage methods, encrypting important company data, and keeping track of any devices leaving your workplace. When it comes to securing your data, you can never be too safe. 

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Time to Better Harness Your Data...

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Whether it’s marketing or product development, data is leveraged to make businesses more effective. With productivity, data plays a crucial role in identifying trends and helping teams and individuals improve their performance. 

With that in mind, the entire journey starts by figuring out how to measure productivity and understand the collected data. If you’re looking to harness productivity data in your organization, the tips above will help you find the right workplace productivity tools and employ them correctly. Your journey to better productivity begins now!