Depsite the fact that many industries were forced to cut costs amidst the recession, the Workplace Analytics market was spared from this scenario. Namely, according to a study by Red Thread Research, it has witnessed a 35% annual growth rate between 2019 and 2020.

Company workload during the pandemic often translates to longer working hours. For some employees, with no office environment, the line between work and free time begins to blur. As a result, they suffer from significant overload, including those of physical, emotional, and informational nature.

It’s hard to imagine our lives without Internet access and mobile phones. We’ve grown accustomed to being constantly interrupted both at home and at work. Lack of time for deep work, however, has a negative impact on productivity – an issue which has brought more concern now that most businesses have moved to remote work models. We took a look at how the length of deep work streaks impacts employee productivity and how you can measure them for your business.

While leaders are empowered to make business decisions and to manage people, they lack the right resources i.e. tools and data that would enable them to do it effectively. Employee data is still frequently perceived as the domain of HR – access to it, however, is still limited. This perception has to change, company leadership has to gain access to predictive and prescriptive data that will help them effectively operate in the fast-changing business world.

One of the biggest challenges while working in a hybrid environment is staying innovative and sharing knowledge. Why is that? Hybrid teams tend to create silos, which results in less peer-to-peer interactions with people from various teams across the organization. Science suggests that this can have a negative impact on a company’s innovativeness.

The ability to focus on cognitively demanding tasks is the most important team productivity factor. In fact, as noticed by Cal Newport, “deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep – spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way”. In addition, what we’ve seen during the pandemic is that a (wrongly executed) remote work model can have a detrimental effect on our teams’ productivity levels.

65% of workers said that meetings keep them from completing their own work.

What companies are doing in passive listening and what results they observe?

Successful companies no longer evaluate their teams through the prism of efficiency. As proven by a number of successful companies, including Intercom, GitLab, Boeing, and General Electric, the spotlight should be set on performance, as it better suits today’s organizational structures. In order to thrive, it’s essential to build High Performance Teams.

While the requirements towards leadership in the pandemic era haven’t changed significantly, the expectations in regards to them are much higher. Managing people is no longer solely the domain of HR departments; it’s now also become the key responsibility of team managers.

While meetings are a vital element of effective collaboration, if there are too many of them, they can become overwhelming. In America alone, 11 million meetings take place every day, out of which a third is considered unproductive. This lost productivity costs companies $37 billion annually. What’s worrying is that the switch to remote working caused by the pandemic has doubled the number of meetings from 7 to 14 a week.

In recent years, a lot of focus has been drawn towards guaranteeing the well-being and work-life balance of employees, and how leaders can support their team. However, not enough is being said on how this can take a huge toll on leaders. Especially now during COVID, they’re often overwhelmed with the number of meetings and forced to work after hours, which leads to burnout. Organizations must take care of their leaders first.

Despite serving as a real eye-opener for many organizations, customer engagement surveys come with their own sets of limitations. In order to give valuable insights and improvement ideas, they need to be paired up with People Analytics tools (i.e., a mix of active listening & passive listening employee engagement methods).

To ensure that their people leadership capability building strategy is future-proof, organizations will need to focus on two areas – embracing a selective-intensive people leadership approach and knowing how to access and analyze team data to make more agile-based decisions.

Workplace analytics measures employee behaviors and analyzes them to improve people and business performance. If implemented right, it might become a great business advantage for companies operating in the New Normal. Nowadays, the main challenge is to keep a sense of belonging among employees who work remotely. Workplace analytics gives leaders access to data linked with productivity, engagement, turnover, etc. This, in turn, helps them keep their employees happy rather than isolated. They are able to better lead their teams.

HR leaders and directors have always been exposed to various challenges. However, after switching to remote work their number has either grown or current challenges gained in strength. We have talked to HR leads in tech organizations to identify the current problems they’re facing as well as how workplace analytics can help in tackling them.