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Ways to Leverage Workforce Analytics in Google Workspace to Build Employee Empowerment

Many organizations know they can use data insights for employee empowerment and to enhance productivity. Learn how workforce analytics within Google Workspace can empower employees.

Stephanie Stouck

By Stephanie Stouck

picture of a workspace

Employees want fulfilling work that drives career growth in an environment that also supports healthy, sustainable work habits and productivity. Businesses want employees equipped and empowered to be productive, wherever they work, to ensure goals are met. Achieving meaningful outcomes for both is rooted in understanding how employees actually get work done. 

Many organizations know they can use data insights to empower employees and enhance their productivity. Still, turning that knowledge into a daily practice can be challenging. How can you enable sustained productivity for long-term value? Let’s start with what employee empowerment is in its simplest form.

What is employee empowerment?

Employee empowerment provides a competitive advantage. Employee empowerment elevates the employee rather than minimizing them — it is proactive, rather than reactive. In the digital era, this means looking at human-centered metrics such as outcomes, engagement, creativity, health and well-being.

More and more organizations are collecting human-centric metrics to gain the visibility they need to be successful, while also including employees in the productivity conversation to build trust and empowerment along the way. This is why leveraging productivity data to support employees has evolved from a “nice-to-have” to a business necessity and competitive advantage. 

Help employees achieve their goals

With much of today’s work happening across remote, in-office and hybrid locations, employees need insights to help optimize individual productivity while maintaining healthy work habits. They want to know:

  • Am I at risk for burnout?
  • Do I need to take more breaks or shorten my day?
  • Am I able to focus?
  • What tools help or hinder my productivity?
  • Is my schedule optimized so I can take time to unplug from work and avoid burnout?

ActivTrak empowers employees with insights to help them assess individual work habits so they can manage their time more efficiently and communicate their preferred way of working to coworkers and managers. 

Our latest integration, ActivTrak for Google Workspace, makes it even easier to empower employees by giving them access to ActivTrak personal work metrics directly in Google Calendar and other Workspace apps. Employees gain visibility into all their digital work such as screen time, breaks taken, overutilized days and app usage from within their Google Workspace environment.

By embedding personal work insights into Google Workspace, employees can:

  • Receive guidance from ActivTrak’s Productivity Lab experts 
  • Review work wellness to understand if they are at risk for burnout
  • Examine digital work habits to see which tools help or hinder their productivity

The Personal Insights Dashboard gives employees a single source of truth, including: 

  • Productivity insights that break down focus, collaboration and multitasking time 
  • Wellness insights that show how they’re managing their workload to avoid fatigue 
  • Technology insights that distinguish which tools boost productivity vs. create distractions and interrupt employees’ ability to focus on their work  

3 tips for employees based on productivity data

  1. Focused sessions take time to improve. Aim to increase your sessions a little at a time. Set a goal to increase your average session time by 50%. Use a timer tab on your computer (www.timer-tab.com/) as a reminder of your goal.
  2. Schedule your time based on when you’re most likely to be focused, using the data provided. Set your breaks for when you typically grow distracted.
  3. Learn what most often distracts you at work. Notifications from email, collaboration and messaging tools are common sources of distraction. Silence these applications for 2-3 hours a day and see how it impacts your ability to stay on task.

Employee empowerment starts with visibility

Everyone’s goals will vary — that’s the beauty of having access to data like this. When they do, employees can: 

  1. Identify when and where they work best throughout the day 
  2. Set goals to improve their work habits on an ongoing basis
  3. Communicate to team members when and how they work best 

Productivity, wellness, burnout and technology enablement are hot topics in today's workplace. ActivTrak for Google Workspace and the Personal Insights Dashboard empower employees to unlock their own productivity potential on a daily basis so organizations can provide the relevant and critical support they need where it’s most needed.

Learn more about ActivTrak for Google Workspace

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