A productive workforce is essential for a company’s success. With massive changes in the workforce landscape today, companies must utilize data-driven insights and automated processes to ensure high productivity levels. Debbie Zelten, practice director of custom applications and data analytics at Synoptek, discusses three ways data insights help improve and standardize workforce productivity.
A productive workforce is one of the most important factors in determining whether an enterprise will not only survive but also succeed in today’s ever-evolving and dynamic business environment. While innovations and technologies are key in shaping how businesses are built and managed, employees are integral to maintaining an organization’s operational needs, cooperation between business functions and strategic coordination.
A streamlined, intelligent approach to creating optimal workforce productivity enables an organization to devote 100% of its efforts to the most pressing tasks at hand or those that require human intervention to ensure quality service and elevate experiences for its customers.
Productivity levels are rising worldwide despite the numerous challenges that nearly every industry has faced. Additionally, work environments and habits have drastically changed over the past two years, causing the remote workforce to become much more prevalent due to the fundamental transformation that the global pandemic created. And with a more decentralized, virtual workforce, there is an inherent need for organizations to utilize data-driven insights and automated processes that help to ensure consistent and high levels of productivity in every area of the business.
Here are three ways data insights help in improving and standardizing workforce productivity.
1. More Time to Focus on Strategic Tasks
Employees allocate a great deal of time correcting, fixing and tracking down data values and then sorting that information through spreadsheets, downloads, pivot tables, etc. To achieve increased productivity, repetitive tasks that take time and energy must be reduced. A solution for this is to automate data collection processes, which allows businesses to pull and store data in a much more organized and efficient manner. By deploying automation, businesses can expect the following benefits:
- Accuracy: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) enables businesses to produce much more accurate results, and utilizing automated data entry creates more precision across the board.
- Less unnecessary manual work for employees: Automation alleviates the need for pulling data manually and reduces the time it takes to extract, analyze and visualize data. This ultimately allows employees to be more productive in other areas of the business that require a greater need for human intervention.
- Consistency: By setting predetermined rules and requirements for data collection, businesses can ensure the captured values will remain consistent.
Reduced capital expenses: By decreasing process touchpoints and the number of people required to carry them out manually, automated data collection allows businesses to become more cost-efficient. - Accessibility: With a prevalent hybrid culture, providing virtual access to data is crucial. Automation allows for real-time access to the most up-to-date information.
- Less room for human Error: Human error naturally becomes more prevalent as a business scales or has larger data sets. By deploying automation, businesses almost eliminate human error entirely while also significantly reducing resource-intensive time spent on manual manipulation per employee across data collection, processing and analysis.
- Compliance issues: Utilizing automated data collection ensures that all data sets adhere to industry standards.
- Intelligent, data-driven decision-making: Automated data collection provides insightful information that helps form more intelligent and data-driven business decisions.
2. Quicker Decision-making
Implementing and using BI platforms are incredibly beneficial for businesses and decision-makers and can be a vital tool for enhancing a workforce’s overall productivity. Key data from BI platforms can elevate productivity by:
- Enabling users to work with massive data sets and allowing for analysis without the pain of handling data of any size, which is beneficial for intuitive use.
- Offering visualization capabilities that showcase data trends, good and bad metrics, anomalies, etc., especially when used in strategic decision-making.
- Allowing access to intelligent insights and reporting generation that can be automated and immediately deployed to the workforce.
- Creating flexibility and seamless user experience capabilities while also integrating insights with other platforms and applications.
BI platforms also empower employees to make quick and informed decisions, which is important for any organization. The data provides the insights required for intelligent, data-driven decision-making and eliminates the need for employees to do their own manual analysis, which leaves much room for human error. With advancements in AI, organizations with elevated analytics platforms can also automate the actions needed to carry out those decisions solely based on the specific data collected.
3. A Deeper Comprehension of Workforce Challenges and Opportunities
While these insights help organizations increase workforce output in a reverse strategy, the information can also be beneficial for monitoring and measuring employee productivity levels. Depending on the industry, organizations can use data to track customized metrics that will enable a better understanding of their workforce. These numbers measure productivity according to a business’s strategic plans and main goals or objectives. Once those parameters are determined, data can be collected, measured, reported and even used for predictive analytics.
While productivity may be defined using a simple formula, the variables influencing it are often unique and extremely complex. This is weighing in factors such as employee cases worked, the number of bugs in quality assurance, output performance, individual and team efficiency over time, and more. Additionally, it’s important to remain aware of new and ongoing developments to overcome potential risks, disruptions and other workforce upheavals that negatively affect productivity. Utilizing insights collected from defined factors and metrics like this will undoubtedly improve workforce productivity, both short and long-term.
In conclusion, optimizing workforce productivity is essential if an organization is to survive. And utilizing data-driven insights collected through automation and business intelligence platforms is a streamlined and highly beneficial way to ensure the team is working in the most optimal, efficient way possible.
Original Article posted on Spiceworks Inc.