Work Efficiency - Trends

Internal and external distractions can lead to inefficiencies in the workplace. Viewing trends over time can help determine whether a team's challenges are associated with specific events, such as a project setback, shift in strategy, or process delay (perhaps causing a decline in efficiency over the course of 1-2 weeks) or if they are indicative of deeper issues, like misalignment on strategy or lack of engagement (resulting in a steady decline over time).

A. Working Hours by Day Trends

• Avg Productive Hrs / Day Breakdown vs Goal: See how a team's productive time compares to the team goal, and how productive time is divided between focused work, collaboration, and multitasking activities. Evaluating how a team spends its time over a period of weeks or months can help managers surface patterns and detect variations in work habits.

Productivity Lab Tip

Sometimes there are clear reasons for lower-than-average productive time-- maybe there are holidays or company shutdowns. Be sure to recall weekly context and external events before drawing conclusions and taking action.

• Avg Focused Hours / Day vs Goal: This view reveals important detail surrounding employees’ focus habits. Focus time can vary depending on functions and roles within a group. It is important to set goals specific to a team’s responsibilities in order to draw accurate conclusions from this chart.
• Avg Collaboration Hrs / Day vs Goal: See how much time a team spends on collaboration activities in comparison to the team's goal. Setting Collaboration goals can be useful for teams like sales and customer support that spend much of their time interacting with customers. (By default, ActivTrak classifies Collaboration Time as time spent in chat / messaging apps and meeting software. This can be configured in 'Insights - Configuration.')

B. Efficiency Trends:

Productivity Lab Tip

High efficiency in this chart, combined with healthy Total Hours Day vs. Average reflects a highly productive and healthy workload balance across the organization.

• Productivity Efficiency % Trend: Productivity Efficiency shows managers the degree in which employees are engaging in productive activity compared to total time (productive and non-business) at their computers.
• Focus Efficiency % Trend: Focus is a subset of productivity time. In the Focus Efficiency % Trend, managers can understand the degree of focus time versus total time week over week. High focus efficiency suggests that employees are spending considerable time throughout their day in deep, undistracted work. For particular roles, those with an emphasis on innovation, research, and development, this is to be expected. For those roles that require more management and meeting time, we are likely to see lower efficiency % over time.

Learn more about the different metrics included in Insights by accessing our data glossary.