Understanding your team’s work habits is key to driving effective coaching conversations and maximizing productivity. ActivTrak provides tons of rich data to help you gain these insights, but the sheer quantity of information can be overwhelming. As a manager, you don’t have time to review every report on a regular basis. So where should you start?
To help you zero in on the insights that matter most, we’ve outlined 5 essential reports for managers along with a recommended review cadence. Stay on track by creating email subscriptions to have these reports delivered to your inbox on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. We also recommend creating email subscriptions for your team members to promote transparency and foster collaboration.
The guidance below will help you leverage ActivTrak data to increase productivity and collaboration across distributed teams, identify team members at risk of burnout, and promote healthy work habits.
Reports to Review Daily
These reports provide a quick pulse on your team’s activity to manage priorities and workload distribution. They are ideal for maintaining visibility across distributed teams, especially when schedules don’t allow for daily check-ins with each team member.
Team Pulse
With Team Pulse, you get a snapshot of productivity across your team, with real-time views of each team member’s activity and summary details of their day — productive hours as a percent of total work time, top category, and top activity.
When managing a team, whether in-person, remote, or hybrid, it can be difficult to ensure that employees are spending time on the right things. Team Pulse is your virtual office dashboard, giving you the ability to check in on your team even when you are all working from different places. It can help you identify misalignment and signal the need to discuss priorities and goals.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Are employees’ top categories and activities aligned with their responsibilities and priorities?
- Are team members spending the majority of their work day on productive activities?
- Are team members consistently online during the hours you’d expect?
Workload Balance
With the Workload Balance report, you can see which team members are over- or underutilized, based on their productive hours per day compared to the goals you’ve set.
Burnout can be tough for managers to prevent, especially because overworked employees often don’t speak up until exhaustion has set in. Monitoring utilization levels enables you to spot burnout risk early, so you can intervene before it becomes a serious problem.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- For how many days has a team member been overutilized? Is it a trend, or an anomaly due to a major project that is currently in flight?
- Are underutilized employees completing their projects and meeting deadlines? Are they simply working efficiently, or do their low work levels indicate a lack of engagement?
- Is there an opportunity to redistribute work amongst team members?
Reports to review weekly
Consult these reports weekly to identify patterns in your team’s work habits and assess progress toward goals. Consider how you might leverage these insights to drive conversations around professional development and work-life balance.
Benchmarks and Goals
With Benchmarks and Goals, you can view benchmarks and trends for productivity and focus across a team’s top quartile, and view daily trends to understand how team productivity and focus have changed over the last 1, 4, or 12 weeks.
Setting productivity and focus goals at the individual and team level is an effective way to motivate and align teams. Customers often ask us for guidance in determining these goals, but there is no one set of numbers that makes sense for every individual or every team. To set meaningful targets, you need to understand the norm — track these metrics over the course of a month to establish benchmarks upon which to improve.
Questions to ask:
- Are there detectable patterns in the work habits of my team’s top quartile? What can other team members learn from them?
- Have individuals made progress against their personal benchmarks, even if they are below the team average?
Work Efficiency
With the Work Efficiency report, you will see a breakdown of total work hours into productive time, focused time, and collaboration time. Consult the ‘Inefficiency Sources’ tab to understand what is causing distractions. Get a detailed analysis of each team member’s work habits and efficiency in their Personal Insights dashboard. Drill into an individual’s name within the Work Efficiency report to see their Personal Insights.
Productive time is useful as a high-level metric (are my employees working or not?) but efficiency and focus are more meaningful indicators — they tell you how long it takes team members to complete their work, and how much of that time is spent focused on a particular activity. Carving out time for focus sessions can maximize efficiency and improve output quality.
Questions to ask:
- How can employees adjust their work and meeting schedules to take advantage of the days and times when they tend to be most productive?
- What coaching can I give my team to encourage focused work sessions and mitigate disruptions?
- How can I leverage these insights to improve collaboration within my team?
Reports to Review Monthly
Take time each month to zoom out and assess longer term trends. Productivity and efficiency may — and almost certainly will — fluctuate week-over-week, but consistent patterns emerge over the course of one or more months. We also recommend taking a 30-day view of the Work Efficiency report, mentioned above.
Team Comparison
With Team Comparison, you can compare Productivity, Focus, Multitasking, and Collaboration time across teams and to the organizational average. Identify correlations between these metrics and each team’s top applications and websites.
As hybrid work models have become the new normal in many organizations, managers face a new set of questions and challenges: Are employees more productive at home or in the office? How does remote work impact employee engagement and work-life balance?
Questions to consider:
- Are there distinct patterns within remote or in-office teams — higher productivity, focus, efficiency?
- Where does each team spend the majority of their time?
- How can I foster collaboration between in-office and remote workers?
See for yourself
With ActivTrak, you can easily understand if your team has healthy work habits that provide enough focus time for creative thinking, problem solving, and development. Check out some of the other reports we’ve developed specifically for managers like you! Don't have an ActivTrak account? Sign up for a free account today.
About ActivTrak
ActivTrak helps companies unlock productivity potential. Our award-winning workforce analytics and productivity management software provides expert insights that empower people, optimize processes, and maximize technology. Additionally, with data sourced from more than 9,500 customers and over 450,000 users, ActivTrak’s Workforce Productivity Lab is a global center for ground-breaking research and expertise that helps companies embrace and embody the future of work.
