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.

The metrics that companies currently focus on while calculating employee turnover including: employee journey, business unit, reason for leaving focus on the current state only, and do not provide any social context. Without it, businesses lack any abilities to predict when employees start thinking about exiting the company, and as a result can’t prevent it. Paying attention to metrics like workload, level of support, and learning opportunities let organizations better foresee when employees are about to quit.

Operating in a hybrid model appears to be a perfect compromise between full-time, office based work and the convenience of working from home. That being said, ‘hybrid’ means different things for different companies. For some, it’s a way to use up their current office lease before a 100% move to a remote work model. Meanwhile for others, it’s more about creating spaces for collaborative tasks and integration, and reserving in-house for individual, deep focus work.

Making sure that your team has enough time i.e. at least 2 hours a day for deep work and reducing context switching is necessary to maintain high productivity. Jumping between tasks results in 80% productivity loss, which has a detrimental effect on employee performance. One of the best ways to make sure that your employees have enough time for deep work is by creating routines and tracking data. For this reason, we recommend using a platform like Network Perspective that will give you access to invaluable insights about how your teams work.

According to a PwC survey which included 1,000 senior executives, companies who heavily rely on data are three times more likely to make good business decisions than those who are not as data reliant. Even though access to workplace data plays a vital role in making data-informed decisions, data alone simply isn’t sufficient. People leaders need to be able to properly interpret it to be able to implement improvements.

mBank / Poland's fourth largest universal banking group and a world icon when it comes to mobile banking and innovations.

Workplace Analytics can bring a lot of benefits to the business without violating privacy laws or making your employees feel ambushed. In order to make this happen, you should analyze data on a team, not a per-employee level. The success of your organization doesn’t come down to analyzing an individual, but requires scale – i.e., understanding data for the entire team. Furthermore, traditional Workplace Analytics tools miss out on 99% of work experience-related data, which provide a variety of actionable insights for the business.

Talent attraction and retention are one of the biggest challenges for organizations of all shapes and sizes. The success of HR BPs is often measured by the proportions between the number of people who stay and leave the company.

Operating in the New Normal requires businesses to focus on resilience rather than efficiency, making the employee experience a priority. This will positively impact organizational growth, and help you perform better than the competition. However, to create a great employee experience, executives must have access to data, and that’s where people analytics comes into play.