Why Analytics Is Indispensable For Managing Remote Workers

Every business needs the right set of metrics to perform data-driven decisions. From digital marketing analytics to workforce metrics, numbers help measure areas of your mostly intangible business. Even now that companies are switching to remote teams, analytics is still highly valuable.

When managing a remote team, visibility can be critical to productivity, but how do you know your team is doing its job when they’re away from the office? Analytics is the answer. Here’s why analytics is so essential for hybrid and fully remote teams.

Provides Better, More Reliable Engagement Insights

Whether your team is remote or not, engagement is the core of a successful workplace. In a remote team, all interactions happen remotely through email, chat, and video conferencing.

Without hard data, you can’t measure your team’s engagement. You can’t tell if they’re actually working or how much they’re getting things done. Analytics is the solution, showing you and your team in real time whether your members are productive or not.

A remote team needs clear directives, and measuring performance is one great way to achieve it. Start by documenting each role's performance standards and highlighting those in your job descriptions. Then, measure your team’s progress against these standards using analytics.

For engagement insights, you can start with basic analytics, such as the number of calls, emails, and chats, as well as average first response and resolution time. You can then leverage workforce analytics to measure team performance and engagement. This can give you visibility into individual and team productivity and help you discover opportunities for improvement.

Helps You Understand Your Employees’ Work Habits

Remote work isn’t for everyone. Employees who thrive in a remote team are the ones who are highly self-motivated. If you’re unsure how self-motivated your team members are, analytics can help.

With productivity data, you’ll know whether each member is showing signs of being unmotivated. This can help you understand how you can improve your team’s engagements. This is vital when measuring a team’s ROI by doing a pricing analysis for the team’s services rendered.

By tracking everyone at work in real-time, you can gather a nearly accurate picture of how your team spends its time. This data can highlight individual and team productivity and show which days of the week are the busiest or slowest.

Analytics clarifies how much time and effort your remote employees put into their work, allowing you to uncover their strengths and weaknesses. Through data, you can also identify emerging problems and fix them early. How much time and effort does each employee put into their work?

Allows You to Track and Improve Productivity

As you start tracking metrics for engagement, you’ll likely notice dips in productivity. From the data, you’ll be able to address the problems and bring your team back to productivity.

For example, if an employee spends a lot of time in the chat app, you’ll know immediately whether they’re chatting with colleagues, waiting for work, or avoiding work. You can help your team members work more efficiently by discovering and addressing these productivity issues.

Additionally, you can use analytics to benchmark your team’s productivity over time. This can give you an understanding of how well your team is performing and even benchmark performance against other remote teams.

Provides Valuable Feedback

You can receive the most valuable feedback from your current and previous employees. They won’t be afraid, to tell the truth about your company and will point out specific areas where you can improve.

Unfortunately, it’s not always easy for remote teams to get that type of feedback. If you’re managing a remote team, analytics can provide valuable feedback from your current and previous employees. You can set up automated feedback surveys that will be sent to each team member, allowing you to gain valuable insights from them.

For every member, analytics delivers feedback about their performance. This data can help them improve by giving them an idea of how they’re doing compared to similar roles. It can also help them get an idea of how they can improve.

For new hires, this data helps train them for the role. For remote employees, this can help them improve their productivity. For a manager, data helps improve productivity by providing it to their remote team.

Helps You Understand Your Team’s Strengths And Weaknesses

Every team has strengths and weaknesses. For instance, one member might be great at scheduling meetings but terrible at responding to emails.

Analytics help you know which members excel and which members need help. You can use it to understand how each member can help the team achieve its goals, and you can utilize each member’s strengths to have a productive team. For example, if you’re looking to prevent digital eye strain in your team, you can encourage flex time to prevent long-term computer exposure.

Working remotely as a team requires more than just specified skills. It also requires them to work well as a team - another area where analytics can help. Analytics can shed light on how your team works together and help you identify areas of potential improvement.

Improves Employee Performance

Analytics can help you identify employee performance and engagement trends. An area of analytics that helps improve employee performance and productivity is forecasting. Your team’s productivity is directly related to the schedule you set for them. By calculating projected work hours, you can see how much work time is available and how many hours your team will work during the day.

Workforce analytics also help you identify trends and patterns in employee performance. By monitoring individual performance, you can recognize the need for training and other internal resources when the need arises. Your employees will be able to learn at their own pace. You can see how they’re improving over time, and you can set up new goals as needed.

Analytics will also let you know which employees are underperforming. You can then decide how to engage these employees and provide assistance directly.

The Bottom Line

Analytics can identify trends and patterns in employee performance and engagement and help you identify areas of improvement. It can also help create schedules that give your remote team the right amount of work time.

Whether managing a remote team of two or 20, analytics can help you deliver exceptional results while attracting, retaining, and motivating the best talent. You can take your remote team to the next level by making data-driven decisions.