Optimize Remote Workforce Performance

As a company spread across multiple countries and time zones, we faced the challenge of ensuring productivity and performance across our remote workforce. We also needed data to highlight if and when employees were underperforming that would enable us to address issues directly.

Traditional employee monitoring solutions seemed overly invasive and didn’t align with our company culture. Plus, they seemed to offer little value. I wanted to understand how employees get their jobs done, not what they do on their lunch break.

Overall we needed a tool that could provide valuable insights into employee contributions without compromising privacy or impacting bandwidth and computing power. Once I saw Prodoscore I knew it was exactly what we needed.

The Solution

Prodoscore’s productivity monitoring solution offered the ideal solution. Its minimally invasive and cloud-based approach ensured that it wouldn’t disrupt our employees’ workflows or consume excessive bandwidth, while at the same time focusing on data that provides value to employees and managers alike.

The platform’s ability to be tailored to specific departments and roles was particularly appealing, as it allowed us to focus on the metrics that mattered most to each team. For example, Quickbooks is a finance and accounting tool that we only monitor for our accounting team. It doesn’t impact any other departments. A lot of other tools we looked at require a complicated set up to distinguish between unique roles and departments while Prodoscore’s ease of customization and flexibility sets it apart.

The Impact

Implementing Prodoscore was a straightforward and painless process, and the solution has had a significant positive impact on our company. Employees were reticent when we first rolled out the tool but now they appreciate all the upside. We’ve seen a notable improvement in overall productivity in fact, as employees are more aware of their performance and motivated to excel. Plus, the accountability it creates is hugely valuable. They know that my activity is available in Prodoscore too, which I think makes them more comfortable about the tool overall.

It gives me, as a manager, great insight. I especially love the emails I get outlining the top and bottom contributors for the week. That data serves as a guide for me so I know where to focus my time. For example, when someone’s score shoots up to a 95, well above their norm, I immediately check in to make sure their workload is ok. Oftentimes they’ll let me know it was just a really busy day or they’re up against a deadline for a big project but it paves the way for us to address any workload or bandwidth challenges before they become an issue. Similarly, when someone’s score drops dramatically, the notification prompts me to check in. Maybe the employee was stuck working on a doc for 5 hours a day this week which meant less time for other activities or maybe it’s something more critical. A lot of my employees will explain why their score may be lower on a particular day or week, adding to the accountability piece, and when I don’t get clarity from them on why their score is dropping, it’s typically an indication that something else is going on.

One great example of the positive impact came very recently. I saw that our finance guy had a 100 score. He typically maintains an average score so the big jump and such a high number struck me as odd. When I took a look at his workday I saw that he worked a full day and logged off but came back online presumably after dinner for another 3-4 hours. It was the last day of the month and he was trying to get all our vendor invoices taken care of. While I don’t expect a 12 hour workday from anyone, I was so proud of the effort he put in to get the work done on time. And, he didn’t have to come bragging to me about it – I was able to give him a great shoutout on our company chat, which made him feel appreciated. As this story shows, Prodoscore makes it easy to pinpoint those opportunities for recognition when an employee goes above and beyond.

I also rely on Prodoscore data now for our end of year performance evaluations. It has been instrumental in helping us make more informed decisions about promotions and bonuses. In fact, we run a monthly contest for the highest Prodoscore where the top 3 winners earn a cash prize. The score is rolled into our company KPIs and we have bonuses tied to our minimum threshold score of 75. So everyone is held accountable and knows exactly how they need to show up in order to succeed.

We recently looked at our Social Network “web” and were pleasantly surprised to learn that there are no communication silos at the company. While we didn’t set out to understand how our team collaborates, it’s an added bonus to visualize how collaborative the team is and verify that everyone is engaging with one another very regularly.

From a financial standpoint, we’ve also experienced some great wins. We onboarded 2 new hires a few months back and after 60 days I suspected they were underperforming but I didn’t want to rely solely on my gut. Prodoscore gave me clear, empirical evidence that unfortunately they were slacking off. The data is completely objective so no one can argue with it. And in the case of the 2 new hires I was able to let them go right away. It was clear that the issue was not related to training. Without a tool like Prodoscore it would have taken me 6-9 months to know that. Speeding up the need to cut out the dead weight saves companies a lot of money and time.

Another unexpected benefit of the data Prodoscore provides is the opportunity for self-coaching. Employees have access to their own performance data, which empowers them to take ownership of their productivity and identify areas for improvement themselves.

Advice for Business Leaders

I think one of the biggest learnings for me has been in the amount of time I’ve saved running numbers and tracking performance. Throughout my career I’ve spent hours every week and quarter to understand key metrics and gauge performance insights. At the end of the day I’m not even sure that what I pulled was helping or generating more revenue. With Prodoscore I don’t have to do any of that manual work – I can log in any time to find out what someone was doing 6 months ago and compare that to their output today. I can access, at a moment’s notice, how X employee performed last week compared to 3 months ago.

We’ve managed to get rid of a lot of old KPIs because we realized how meaningless they are. In a very simple way, Prodoscore confirms that people are doing their jobs. It’s an empirical source of data that frees me from spending hours running reports and creating pivot tables.

Employees have the data in front of them too. They’re held accountable and given data to help them improve. For companies that want to empower their employees to manage themselves and hold themselves accountable, there’s so much value in Prodoscore’s data.

It’s so simple to adopt, even for a company with multiple departments, like ours. Other tools are highly complicated whereas Prodoscore’s setup and onboarding require very low effort and maintenance.

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