In our recent webinar, John Fraser, Chief Operating Officer at Parts ASAP, and Gabriela Mauch, Chief Customer Officer at ActivTrak, discussed how workforce analytics helped Parts ASAP scale to $379 million in revenue while maintaining a people-first culture across 650 remote employees.
Here are the key highlights from their conversation.
Gabriela: John, I’d love to give the audience an overview of Parts ASAP, your current use cases and your partnership with ActivTrak.
John: We’re a collection of companies that serve new aftermarket and used parts for agriculture, construction and material handling. We’ve grown through organic expansion and acquisitions to about 650 employees across 20 locations.
When Covid hit, we embraced remote work as an opportunity to support our workforce while maintaining accountability through tools like ActivTrak. One of our core values is trusting data rather than intuition for all decision-making.
Sometimes you have high performers working 70 or 80 hours a week, and you don’t know that’s happening. A productivity tool like ActivTrak helps us find people who are burning out so we can properly reallocate resources.
The workforce analytics journey
Gabriela: What sparked that workforce analytics curiosity for you? Did you already have workforce analytics in place?
John: It was about building confidence in our direction and creating clarity for the organization. We needed to know what we were going to do — not just short term, but long term. And we needed data to get there.
The big picture vs. micromanagement
Gabriela: The Parts ASAP team decreased unproductive work pretty extensively. But you did it in a way that I really admired. How did you reduce unproductive time without jeopardizing flexibility?
John: We removed managers from the nitty-gritty details.Instead, we focused on key questions:
- Do people work more than 20% over their expected hours on their computer?
- Do people spend more than 15% of their computer time doing something unproductive or visiting websites they shouldn’t?
Then we’d send out a simple report with nothing more than a name, the amount of unproductive or over-productive time and the type of activities. Managers took it from there.
We intentionally made sure managers didn’t fixate on finding 10 or 15 minutes here and there. That will drive your business mad.
Coaching for success: 80% improvement through data-driven conversations
Gabriela: I’ve watched you set thresholds and to provide a signal so you know when to look, but you don’t look at everything. One of our big value propositions at ActivTrak is equipping managers with the visibility to properly coach their workforce. How have you used ActivTrak data to inform coaching??.
John: We never want to use this as a weapon or a tool for punishment. We use it as an indicator for a conversation. The data that helps us understand what’s happening. Does this person constantly context-switch? Maybe they spend too much time in email when they need to spend more time in the CRM system making sales calls.
In this work-from-home world, you have pets, kids, laundry that needs to be done. Even the best employees get distracted by what’s happening around them. The question is: how do we help people understand that behavior and course correct when it starts affecting 15 or 20% of their time? We show them additional training if needed. We share tips and tricks on how to stay productive during their day. They become contributing members of our workforce.
Roughly 80% of the people who find themselves on a list for a conversation get coached back to meeting expectations and become productive again.
Measurable ROI: immediate productivity gains and strategic resource allocation
Gabriela: Let’s talk about ROI. Customers constantly ask how you measure the ROI of something like this. How have you thought about quantifying it?
John: We started simple: redirect people who need help finding productive time in their day and make sure our computers stay safe from data risks.
We were also transparent with the organization about rolling out this type of tool. We said that we could see general patterns and because “this is a work computer, and we’re paying you to do work, and we want to see that work activity.” That communication alone generated an increase in productivity. We measured it almost immediately as we rolled it out. Within one quarter, we saw 5%, 10%, even 15% increases in productive time.
We also identified people on the lower and higher side of productivity to find out what they did with their time and what they could do differently.
In some cases, we realized people weren’t busy and maybe weren’t raising their hand for more work — but that wasn’t necessarily their fault.
So, we reallocated labor. Instead of someone working in accounts payable, they moved to accounts receivable. Or someone working in IT shifted from one technology to another because we had someone underproductive in one area and someone overworking in another.
Final thoughts: trust, transparency and continuous improvement
Gabriela: What investments and activities do you recommend when implementing a solution like ActivTrak to ensure success? What advice would you give other executives looking to bring on a solution like this?
John: Communication is key — that’s the most important thing. Close behind is having a clearly defined policy on how you’re going to use this data. It cannot be used as a weapon against your employees. You will fail miserably and destroy your organization’s culture. We’re very proud that we’ve maintained our culture while still having a tool like this in place.
You can even use this as a differentiator in hiring. High-capacity people want to be measured. They want to know they’re not walking into an organization where two people are underproductive while two others carry the entire company on their backs.
The biggest things are communication, policy enforcement and living up to the commitments you made to your employees.
