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If you’re managing a distributed or digital team of knowledge workers, at some point you’ve asked yourself: “What is my team doing?”
It’s not that you don’t think they’re working or that you don’t trust them to use their time wisely. Of course you trust your people, otherwise they wouldn’t be your people.
It’s just that you can’t see the inputs and progress of what they’re doing. And to compensate for this lack of visibility into your team’s work, you end up digging through more of your collaboration tools, sending more messages and having way more meetings than necessary just to feel like you have a handle on what’s going on.
And let’s be honest. Your entire team is doing the same thing amongst themselves too. This means there’s a whole lot of collaboration distraction happening across the board—somewhere in the ballpark of 90 minute per person per day.
Yikes.
Work has changed, and your management model needs to change with it.
You need data for you and your team to be able to understand the true scale of your collaboration inefficiencies. And you need to start having necessary conversations about how you can work together to eliminate the habits and processes that aren’t creating value for your business or serving anyone’s success.
Here are five ways work analytics will help you transform how you’re managing digital teamwork so you can not only answer that initial question, “what is my team doing,” but also support greater productivity and less digital distraction for your team.
We’re all dealing with this huge workplace transformation right now. We’ve never been more digital nor had more remote work flexibility, and we’re all trying to adopt and evolve around these new work models.
We’re leaning on a whole suite of collaboration tools like Slack, Zoom and Asana to support work. And while these tools are useful and necessary, the reality is, there are a ton of inefficiencies in how we’re using them. It’s creating a huge digital distraction problem.
Produce8 is a digital work analytics platform that will show you and your team the scale of your collaboration inefficiencies across your entire tech stack.
Your business puts a lot of time and effort into building a great stack of technology tools that help you do your jobs better. And every month, you spend a lot of money paying to maintain access to these tools for your digital-first team.
But how much do you really know about how your team’s using them?
As a manager, you should be able to answer these questions. But without access to the right data, this is no easy task.
Produce8 makes it easy for your entire team to understand how your tech stack is being used each day and over time.
Read about how we used Produce8 to audit our entire team's Slack usage . The results of the audit were pretty interesting!
We always talk about how the future of work should be about the work outputs, not the inputs. But the truth is, we still need to understand the inputs upfront.
By surfacing any inefficient and unnecessary communication and collaboration patterns, your team can maximize the time it does spend working synchronously while also creating more opportunities for highly productive asynchronous work time.
You can learn a lot by diving into the work and technology usage patterns of your individual team members, too.
Have a rockstar in your business who’s really helping to drive your team’s success? Have a look at how they’re using their tools to navigate the digital workday. This could lead to some great cross-training opportunities for your new hires as well as other team members who may be struggling a bit by comparison.
See that some of your newer team members aren’t spending as much time in certain tools as you think they should be? It’s worth investigating why. Perhaps you need to improve your onboard training. Or maybe there are new tools your team members are relying on instead that could benefit your entire team.
Digital knowledge work can be pretty opaque. Hence that question, ‘what is everyone doing?’
And even if you know your team’s working hard, it’s easy for individual digital workers to feel anxiety around their productivity. ‘Does anyone know how hard I’m working?’ This can lead to all kinds of pressure to put in extra work and answer messages outside of work hours, creating an unhealthy work-life balance that can lead to employee burnout.
Your people are your greatest asset. A digital work analytics tool like Produce8 enables your team to start working together ‘out loud’. Adding transparency to the digital workday by pulling everyone's actions and interactions into a digital work hub creates better work awareness and makes everyone’s contributions count.
While digital work isn’t exactly new, we’re all still trying to figure out the best ways to manage more effective digital teamwork environments.
Working with your team and their digital work analytics to create more clarity around the digital work day opens up all kinds of opportunities.
You can collectively eliminate communication and collaboration inefficiencies that are taking up time without offering much value. You can create a more transparent work environment, which means fewer unknowns that require pings and lengthy meetings to resolve. And you can give your people the space and the time to actually work, and maybe delve into those progressive work models that you know leads to healthier, happier and more committed employees.
Good management is about giving your people the information, tools and support they need to succeed—and then getting the heck out of their way so they can actually do it.