Turning Workforce Insights Into Budget Wins and Better Outcomes [Lessons from the Executive Frontlines]

Many executives think they understand how their teams work — until the data reveals a costly gap between what leadership believes is happening and what’s actually going on.

The good news? ActivTrak puts more accurate decisions, smarter budgets and fewer blind spots all within reach. All you have to do is plug workforce insights into the processes you already use. This one key unlocks all kinds of value across your people, facilities, vendors, contractors and compliance programs.

This guide helps you get there. It includes lessons learned from organizations successfully embedding ActivTrak into everyday operations. Follow each step to turn your account into a powerful decision-making engine — one that provides the visibility you need to run your organization with precision and confidence. 

The value of data-fueled workforce management decisions

To understand what embedding workforce intelligence into everyday operations does for your company, consider a real-world scenario from one of our customers. After discovering 428 employees were falling short of productivity goals, leadership uncovered an opportunity to recover $7 million worth of capacity over the course of a year. Armed with these insights, the organization improved internal processes instead of spending money to add more people.

And that’s just one example. ActivTrak customers optimize seasonal staffing, reduce labor costs and lower turnover by as much as 40% — all by using data to guide critical decisions. By replacing assumptions with accuracy, you gain:

• Operational clarity. Identify where effort is going, as well as which activities are truly productive.
• Better capacity planning. Understand bandwidth and workload before committing to new hires.
• Financial accuracy. Align budgets with actual need instead of gut feelings or vanity metrics.
• Workforce equity. Ensure performance decisions reflect objective data.
• Faster decisions. Reduce the lag between observation and action.

Ready to get started? Let’s look at practical tips for getting more value from ActivTrak right now.

How to set up ActivTrak for the most impact

Gaining executive value from workforce analytics starts with several foundational steps.

1. Define your guiding principles

Before you start tracking data, define a handful of guiding principles to steer how your organization will use it. Explain who will use workforce insights, what decisions they’ll inform and which level of detail each stakeholder needs. This first step prevents confusion and ensures proper use.

2. Secure executive sponsorship

When executives model data-driven decision-making, the rest of the organization follows. For this reason, it’s important to get buy-in from all stakeholders including CFOs, COOs, CHROs, CISOs and others. When leaders use the same data as managers to validate hiring needs or analyze existing resources, it sets the tone for the entire organization. 

3. Reframe the narrative

One of the biggest shifts successful organizations make is in how they talk about workforce analytics. Rather than “driving ActivTrak adoption,” these leaders focus on solving productivity challenges. The difference is subtle but powerful. Framing analytics as a measurement solution for improving productivity — not a monitoring system — helps teams understand how the data helps them succeed.

4 ways to embed ActivTrak into existing processes for smarter decisions

The best results don’t come from creating new workflows. Instead, look for ways to weave workforce data into the decisions you already make every day. Here are four practical ways to turn ActivTrak insights into action across your organization.

1. Make your budget go further

Every budget cycle comes with tough choices. Workforce data helps you see exactly where your team’s time and effort go — and that clarity saves real money.

Use ActivTrak’s Headcount Planning dashboard to see who’s stretched thin and who has extra bandwidth. This visibility makes it easier to balance workloads before adding new roles. In fact, one enterprise ActivTrak customer avoided nearly $5.25 million in annualized hiring costs by reallocating work instead of adding headcount.

Next, bring this same data-driven mindset to your core business processes:

• Headcount requests: Confirm actual need by requiring every new request to include ActivTrak’s resource utilization data.
• Performance management: Use objective productivity reports when planning lateral moves, promotions and merit increases.
• Timesheets: Automate time tracking to cut down on manual work and improve accuracy.
• Expense reviews: Evaluate budgets through the lens of actual work activity to see if spending matches output.

These small process updates turn data into daily practice, helping every department improve performance while stretching budgets further.

2. Optimize external spend

External costs add up fast, especially when you use different systems to manage technology, contractors and vendors. Embedding workforce data into these decisions helps you see exactly where your money goes — and whether you’re getting full value in return.

Start by reviewing your technology stack. Most organizations pay for more software licenses than they use, but ActivTrak’s technology usage reports make it easy to identify which tools employees actually rely on — and which ones sit idle.  Maybe a new automation tool replaces multiple apps, or you see teams gravitating toward a few key platforms. Either way, the data clearly shows which subscriptions to keep, consolidate or retire.

Next, apply the same visibility to vendor and contractor billing. ActivTrak lets you compare reported hours to real activity data to verify accuracy and spot inconsistencies before they turn into overpayments. If a vendor bills for a full eight-hour day when the data shows five hours of active work, you know to have a conversation. When a contractor’s work hours line up perfectly, you gain the confidence their invoices are correct.

Adding this check to your normal billing process helps reduce overpayments and creates a fairer, more transparent relationship with vendors. It’s a simple way to make sure you pay for real results and not just reported time. For example, one company uncovered $500,000 in potential overbilling by adding ActivTrak data to existing systems.

Together, these steps help you optimize external spend by reducing waste, increasing transparency and ensuring every dollar drives measurable results.

3. Reimagine workforce management

If your managers still rely on manual timesheets and self-reported metrics to evaluate employee progress, it’s time for a more objective view of what’s really happening day to day. Combining ActivTrak insights with existing HR and operations systems gives you a single, accurate source of truth for managing people and performance. The result is smarter decisions across workload distribution, pay, promotions and policy compliance — all grounded in real data.

For example, if data reveals one team member regularly works long hours while another leaves early, you know to shift workloads instead of approving overtime. It’s an accurate, reliable way to validate overtime while keeping teams healthy and productive.

In addition, use detailed insights to:

• Verify RTO compliance: ActivTrak’s Productivity by Location data helps confirm in-office attendance matches your return-to-office policy expectations, supporting flexibility without losing accountability.
• Improve PTO data accuracy: Compare activity data with paid time off records to ensure absences are logged correctly and in a timely manner.

When you see how and where work happens, it’s easier to reward results, prevent burnout and build trust across every level of the organization — using facts, not feelings.

4. Monitor policy compliance

Keeping everyone aligned on work expectations is key to running a smooth operation. Workforce data helps you spot patterns that might signal a problem.

Check ActivTrak’s Schedule Adherence report on a daily or weekly basis to catch and correct issues as they happen. If the data reveals a pattern of late starts, long breaks and early departures, you know to dig deeper. These are signs something else is going on and needs your attention. The sooner you find and fix root causes, the more likely you are to keep employees engaged and customers satisfied.

Turn visibility into value with ActivTrak

From budgeting and technology planning to vendor management and performance reviews, ActivTrak fuels smarter decisions across the entire organization. The above use cases are a great place to start, but there’s still so much more you can do.

If you want to see how other leaders transform their decision-making with workforce insights, subscribe to our newsletter. You’ll get a regular dose of practical tips, fresh ideas and inspiring stories from more than 9,500 organizations using ActivTrak to reimagine workforce management.