How Team Monitoring Analytics Drive People-Oriented Leadership

In today’s business environment, employee analytics go far beyond the HR department.

Enterprise HR professionals have spent the last few years upgrading their tech stacks to keep up with today’s rapidly evolving, agile workplaces. Remote and hybrid work initiatives have made enterprise employee monitoring software a must-have.

However, relatively few enterprises are capitalizing on the value of the data their employee monitoring app can generate. According to Deloitte, only 13% of enterprises have a team separate from IT that is dedicated to analyzing data and treating it as a strategic asset.

The vast majority of enterprises simply send employee usage statistics to human resources. Critical data on employee productivity and efficiency is seen as an “HR issue”, rather than an organization-wide asset.

The well-known adage that “employees are your greatest asset” has never rang more true than today. If enterprises don’t have a structured and objective method for analyzing employee data to generate actionable productivity insights, company leaders can’t implement transformative, people-oriented improvement.

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Moving People Data Beyond HR

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Pioneering enterprises have begun to use people data outside the HR environment. This move enables them to use data tools and resources ideally suited to the demands of a hybrid work environment that enable productivity, workflows and projects to be objectively monitored via data from anywhere.

This approach generates descriptive, high-quality data about employee activities – their strengths and weaknesses, their capabilities, and their future potential. When enterprises gather and analyze employee tracking software data, they generate insights that enable transformative change through people-oriented leadership.

Real-time analytics data enables fast and fully accountable decision-making on a wide number of people-related business issues. Enterprise leaders who manage large teams without gathering this kind of data are forced to settle with less accurate monthly productivity reports and their own intuition.

Accurate, timely data lets leaders be more engaged with the people who make business achievements possible. It enables the creation of safe and continuous learning communities well-suited for today’s uncertain world.

Employees, Managers, and Leaders Must Become More Agile

In the words of American anthropologist Jamais Cascio, the world we live in today is BANI – Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, and Incomprehensible. These characteristics define just about every aspect of our lives, describing the political, financial, and even personal systems we use to navigate daily life.

• Brittleness. Systems appear to work well on the surface while they are actually on the verge of collapse. This applies to supply chains, stock markets, and public health institutions as well as it applies to small-scale teams. Disruptions in brittle systems can cause interconnected systems to fail, leading to ripple effects in unexpected places.
• Anxiety. Technology empowers people to make better decisions, but it also tends to reduce individual agency, which makes people more anxious. 21st century disinformation plays a role similar to propaganda in the 20th century, stoking peoples’ fears and pandering to their biases for political expediency.
• Non-linearity. Today’s world is so complex and interconnected that it’s become difficult to see cause-and-effect relationships at play. It’s no longer possible to build a coherent, long-term vision with any degree of confidence. Today’s environment changes too quickly for long-term goals to be reasonably achieved – and tomorrow’s will change even faster.
• Incomprehensibility. This is the result of brittle systems interacting non-linearly with anxious people. Having more information doesn’t necessarily mean gaining any real knowledge about the world we live in. Meaningful experience is increasingly difficult to gain, and even harder to apply in novel situations.

This probably sounds like a sci-fi dystopia, but enterprise leaders are responsible for building and maintaining robust, profitable businesses that can thrive in this kind of environment. Employees, managers, and executives have to react to these types of challenges in agile ways. 

Data plays a key role in making this possible. Leaders cannot simply rely on their intuition to gain ground in such an uncertain world. The only way to display true leadership is grounding people management decisions in high-quality data. Interpreted correctly, that data can offer valuable insight that puts people first.

This makes the availability of data-driven insight critical to success. This fact is plain to see when it comes to talent management and allocation in the enterprise.

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Navigating BANI Challenges in the World of People Management

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The BANI environment demands leaders stay up-to-date on a wide variety of issues while constantly considering multiple perspectives and scenarios. Changes are frequent, and often unannounced.

At first, it often seems like the only way to navigate this kind of environment is through trial and error. You may onboard a new hire and spend thousands of dollars on training materials only to have them disappear once they find a better-paying job a few days later. You may have employees stuck completing repetitive, low-value tasks on a daily basis instead of reskilling into higher-impact positions and automating the grunt work.

But for people leaders with resilience and patience, there is a way out. Agile enterprises – guided by agile leaders – can identify these obstacles and deploy solutions for overcoming them.

This kind of approach can have a transformative impact on enterprise productivity and performance. Instead of keeping low-performing employees stuck working tasks not suited to their skillsets, you can assign them to projects that capitalize on their unique strengths. Instead of losing productivity due to intuition-based people management, you can optimize it with people-oriented leadership.

Employee monitoring data is the currency that makes this kind of change possible. With the right insight, people analytics data can help leaders establish successful structures for achieving success even in uncertain environments.

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What Leaders Need to Make Better People Management Decisions

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People-oriented leadership is driven by data, but not defined by data. It places high priority on effective communication, meaningful collaboration, and data democratization. In order to make real gains in this environment, leaders need to institute and maintain three major elements of people-oriented leadership at the enterprise level:

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A High-Performance Workplace Culture

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A high-performance workplace culture is one that has a positive attitude towards enabling individual and team productivity. Employees are not just productive, but motivated and supported on every level of the organization. They’re sympathetic to corporate leadership and aligned to company values.

The high-performance workplace is filled with self-motivated workers who are competent and accountable for their actions. This kind of culture is based on trust, respect, and diversity, with ample opportunities to recognize and encourage outstanding members.

Building a culture that prioritizes ongoing feedback is critical to establishing this kind of culture. Annual performance reviews are important, but they can’t sustain high-performance culture on their own – you need ongoing real-time feedback from peers, managers, and leaders to do that.

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Multiple Communication and Collaboration Tools

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In hybrid and remote-enabled enterprise work environments, choosing a communication platform is a delicate task. While office workers always have an in-person alternative for communication, distributed workforces only have whatever tools their organization provides them with.

That can make high-performance productivity difficult for certain parts of the enterprise. People who aren’t especially communicative on video may be excellent and detailed storytellers through text. Others may thrive on the tiny perceptual cues and body language that comes with in-person communication.

People-oriented leaders who want to build a culture around motivation and performance need to equip those people with the tools they need to communicate effectively. No one tool will do the job for everyone – they’ll need a range of choices that speak to their own particular strengths.

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Complete, Accurate, and Up-to-Date Performance Data

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Perhaps the single most important thing that enterprise leaders can do to build high-performance teams in a people-oriented way is collecting and analyzing individual performance data. There is no way to constantly motivate performance goals using data collected once a year. You need more of it, and more frequently.

Employee tracking software plays a central role enabling this kind of ongoing feedback. Enterprise employee monitoring software can collect user data and make it available for analysis, leading to insights that drive people management decisions and goals.

This is how people-oriented enterprise leaders see performance patterns and make targeted decisions based on real-world data. They use this data to move employees towards tasks they do well, increasing productivity and distributing work in a way that benefits everyone.

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How To Deploy Employee Monitoring Software in the Enterprise Environment

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Not all high-performance workplace cultures are healthy environments to work in. Not all employees see work monitoring tools as good, helpful parts of a people-oriented leadership style. Disciplined leaders will deploy these tools in a transparent, communicative way.

A successful employee monitoring system must be deployed with care. Leaders should take time to assess their implementation and communicate how they address each of these four important aspects of work monitoring:

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Ethics 

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Employees may rightly feel skeptical about the idea of being monitored while they work. You can’t build trust with people if they think your organization is collecting personal, non-work data on them, or monitoring them outside of working hours.  The most effective monitoring systems are open, transparent and privacy-focused. They make it clear what is and isn’t being monitored, and how data is safeguarded.

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Intrusiveness

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Employee monitoring should not feel like another task. When implemented right, it is practically invisible and generates no user experience friction whatsoever. If monitoring applications get in the way of work, they will drag down productivity and erode trust in leadership.

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Employee and Team Perspectives

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Individual employees will have a variety of opinions on how monitoring should be done and what its goals should be. Entire teams may come to different conclusions about how best to implement monitoring software. Make sure everyone gets a chance to communicate their perspective and have their opinions taken into consideration on an individual level.

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Analytics Accessibility

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If HR professionals and executives are the only ones who have access to employee productivity analytics, it’s not a transparent system. Everyone should be able to see their own statistics and draw their own conclusions about how to improve themselves in the workplace. Analytics insights should be highly visual and easy to interpret.

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Empower the People You Lead with Data-Driven Insight

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Effective leaders know how to manage the people they rely on to achieve enterprise goals. Executives with people-oriented leadership styles can significantly improve organization-wide performance by basing their decisions on accurate real-time data.

Employee monitoring solutions can drive the development of high-performance work culture by giving people real-time feedback on their progress. Analyzing the data collected unlocks transformative potential, allowing leaders to give personalized support and encouragement to people. lifting the entire organization in the process.

Using employee tracking software tools in ethical, non-intrusive ways ensures that enterprises can optimize productivity while ensuring every individual has agency over the way they work. Done right, team monitoring analytics is a key component of the people-oriented leadership style that today’s distributed, increasingly decentralized landscape demands.