How to Successfully Roll Out Employee Productivity Monitoring
In today’s era of remote working and hybrid offices, it’s no surprise that more companies are turning to Employee Productivity Monitoring (EPM) solutions to gauge their team’s productivity, performance, and wellbeing.
These innovative software applicationsmeasure data from a variety of sources to understand how employees are using company tools - presenting an objective and comprehensive picture of how individuals, teams, and/or departments are engaged.
This information helps staff make data-driven decisions as they motivate and monitor their employees to hit their targets, meet KPIs, and collaborate more effectively. They’re also a helpful tool for staying on top of employee wellness - giving managers a chance to spot the early warning signs of ‘quiet quitting’, burnout or potential health issues, so they can take action and get their staff the support they need.
There are many benefits to adopting an EPM platform, but any such solution has to be implemented carefully. Roll it out without clearly communicating your strategy beforehand and you risk a backlash that breeds an atmosphere of mistrust, suspicion, and confusion - all of which harms productivity and staff retention over the long term.
Preparing your organization for EPM
If there’s one word to bear in mind while you’re gearing up for adoption of your EPM it’s this:communication.
Engage with every department across the board to foster openness and feedback right from the start. This gives senior management the chance to outline their plans and objectives while also providing an opportunity for employees to weigh in - airing concerns that can then be addressed in a constructive way.
Create a mindset/culture that supports productivity monitoring
It’s tough to change entrenched company culture. If your organization is slow to embrace new employee tools or strategies, now’s the time to shift the tone to a more dynamic approach.
EPM is best viewed as part of a modernization of a company’s tech stack - providing staff with the tools they need to work more efficiently and productively. Seen in this light, EPM platforms are the next step in innovation. Instead of peering over their shoulder in the office, managers now have new and less intrusive ways of guiding and monitoring their teams.
To ease any worries, it’s best to start by explaining exactly what EPM is, and how it works. Be transparent in how you intend to implement your solution, demonstrating how it will work, the kind of data it will collect, where this will be stored, and what it will be used for.
This kind of data literacy is important. Everyone using EPM should understand what it’s tracking. Prodoscore measures cloud tool activity in real-time via an API, noting how employees interact with business applications and then using that information to give them a productivity score.
Think of the productivity score as your FICO, an individual assessment that can change depending on your behavior. Prodoscore provides individual scores as well as organizational scores. Insight into how scores change over time, keeps employers informed about how employees are engaged and enables them to make smarter decisions, rooted in data
And just as FICO is only one element of a consumer’s credit history, your Productivity Score is not the only data point that matters. Rather, it’s a highly useful metric that managers can use to further understand how their staff work, and how they can help them work more efficiently.
Address EPM common misconceptions
Some employees may be hesitant about EPM solutions, worried about losing their privacy or endangering their security online. Counter these fears by choosing an unobtrusive solution that safeguards both data privacy and protection.
Employees might be concerned that their managers will be able to see anything and everything they’re doing online, but Prodoscore only integrates with and surfaces data from business tools, not personal applications. If staff are surfing the web or checking personal emails, that data is not captured - and, quite frankly, provides no value.
The data Prodoscore does collect is encrypted in transit and stored in a highly-secure data center. Before being stored, it goes through multiple additional layers of encryption to ensure it’s fully protected in the GCP.
Create a roadmap
You may have everyone onboard, but don’t be tempted to rush into deploying EPM. Instead, draw up a roadmap to roll it out, identifying the various steps and expected outcomes. This roadmap should answer questions like:
- Do senior staff fully understand the solution, and how to use it?
- Which departments/teams will be the early adopters?
- What teams will use it, and under what timeline?
- How will your EPM solution integrate with other tools?
- What will data be used for? How will it shape company policy and employee reviews going forward?
Once you have your plan mapped out, introduce your EPM. Installing Prodoscore is quick and easy, generating results within 24 hours of deployment. It takes just 15 minutes to get up and running and integrates seamlessly with most common business tools including Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, MS Teams, Docusign, Salesforce, RingCentral, QuickBooks, and Slack. Contact our team today to schedule a demonstration or find out more.
