How to Introduce ActivTrak to Your Organization

New ActivTrak customers often have questions about how to introduce ActivTrak to their employees. While the process will look a bit different for every organization, we recommend following a few best practices to ensure a smooth rollout and drive employee engagement.

Keep these four key themes in mind to ensure your rollout of ActivTrak is a success:

• Be transparent about your intent and about how employee data will be used. 
• Communicate and communicate often. Notify employees prior to implementation, provide enablement throughout the onboarding process, and establish regular touchpoints once you’re up and running to share insights and capture feedback.
• Encourage ownership in the results. Proactively communicate key findings and collaborate on solutions. Emphasize a culture of continuous learning and performance improvement.
• Culture always comes first. Focusing on the first three themes shows a commitment to transparency, improvement, and collaboration. Reinforce this messaging whenever possible.

Be Transparent: Build trust and get buy-in

Most experts recommend being upfront about your productivity monitoring program including what data you collect and how you intend to use it. The software is meant to provide insights to improve your business. It should not be used to spy on employees or incite invasive or harassing behaviors. Organizations should prioritize and protect employee privacy while using productivity monitoring solutions. Trust and transparency are essential to building productive teams! 

Communicate: How to inform employees and managers

We recommend a phased approach to communicating ActivTrak to your organization, starting with sharing plans with people managers in your organization since they will likely be using data from ActivTrak, and responding to questions from their teams. 

After you’ve explained ActivTrak and your goals to the leaders in your organization, we recommend inviting employees to a “town hall” style meeting where you can explain the goals you have for using ActivTrak and answer their questions. 

To help you communicate ActivTrak to your organization, we’ve developed a set of templates geared toward addressing questions that employees and managers are likely to have. Keep in mind, these are templates that can be customized to best suit your organization and goals. 

• Guide for Introducing ActivTrak to your organization

• Email template to introduce ActivTrak to your organization 

• Presentation for introducing ActivTrak to managers 

• Presentation for introducing ActivTrak to all employees

• ActivTrak FAQs 

Download them all with one click here.

Encourage Ownership: Share data to drive continuous improvement

Sharing ActivTrak data with employees promotes transparency, enables self-improvement, and helps individuals understand how they contribute to the organization’s success. With insight into their own work habits, employees can identify opportunities for improvement and make adjustments without having to rely on manager intervention.

You can give employees access to their data in ActivTrak without revealing the private information of others by configuring Role Access settings within your account.

Employees who have access to your account will receive the Weekly Digest email every Monday morning, which provides a high-level recap of team activity and productivity over the previous week.

With Insights, you can also create email subscriptions for yourself and others in your organization to share regular updates on key metrics. This helps managers and individuals assess progress toward goals, identify blockers, and make necessary adjustments.

Having shared access to workforce insights helps facilitate healthy conversations between managers and their team members. We recommend that managers schedule weekly or monthly reviews to provide coaching advice, address lack of engagement or potential burnout risk, collaborate to address productivity blockers, and recognize positive improvement.

It’s important to keep in mind that each job function has unique responsibilities, so it’s logical that employees in different roles will spend their time on different activities, and that work habits won’t look the same across the board. What defines a successful, productive salesperson is not what defines a successful, productive engineer. Avoid comparing apples to oranges and instead establish baselines and analyze metrics for similar roles to get accurate business insights. If you are concerned about any data you see, don’t make assumptions. Speak with employees to clear up possible misunderstandings before jumping to conclusions or taking any corrective actions.

Ensure Culture Comes First:

In order to promote trust and transparency, while respecting employee privacy, your use of ActivTrak must prioritize insights versus oversight. By being transparent with employees about using productivity monitoring solutions and by following the other best practices outlined in this article, your deployment of ActivTrak can facilitate a more sustainable and productive workplace that benefits both management and employees alike. 

While the above outlines our recommended approach to implementing ActivTrak within your organization, note that your use of ActivTrak will be an ongoing process. It should be used as a tool for employers and employees alike to identify key areas that can unlock valuable productivity improvements. 

Take action with these additional, helpful resources:

• Set up scheduled tracking to only monitor devices during working hours to respect employee privacy during off-hours.
• Learn how we at ActivTrak share productivity data with our teams, and collaborate on ways to improve productivity in our “ActivTrak using ActivTrak” webcast series, Part 1 and Part 2.
• Grant access to individual employees so they can view their data and analyze their own work habits and productivity. 
• Subscribe to the Weekly Digest to get a high-level recap of team activity and productivity emailed to you each Monday.