A Manager's Guide to Using ActivTrak

This guide helps people managers understand and interpret Insights dashboards and use the insights to drive measurable, sustainable improvements across different use cases.

While managers are likely to identify with several of the use cases covered in this guide, addressing too many obstacles at once can be disruptive and overwhelming for your team. We suggest identifying the two or three use cases with the greatest potential to drive results across your team. Often, mitigating these can also positively impact other use cases.

In assessing which use cases to prioritize, consider which are most likely to yield quick wins so you can build immediate momentum and demonstrate the value of these insights to your teams (and garner their buy-in). Below, view the reports associated with each use case to collect your data-based insights before devising an action plan to communicate and coach your team.

Note: Dashboards that utilize Insights are available in select plans. Users' access to dashboards may vary based on account configuration. ActivTrak Admins can adjust access settings from the Role Access page. Learn more about roles & permissions for access to your ActivTrak account here. 

Contents

• Preventing employee burnout
• Managing a remote or hybrid workforce
• Measuring and managing productivity
• Balancing workloads
• Streamlining technology usage
• Ensuring operational efficiency and compliance
• Improving team focus and communication
• Learn more

Preventing employee burnout

1. First, refer to Workload Balance to understand which team members are underutilized, overutilized, or healthy. Coaching Opportunities also alerts you to employees who are nearing overutilization. Explore Coaching Opportunities - Utilization.
2. Zero in on team members who are overutilized to better understand their working habits. (You can see more details by clicking on a team member’s name within the report.) Consider questions for greater context: Was a specific deadline requiring additional hours? Is the employee onboarding or upskilling? Have they expressed stress or difficulty keeping up with their workload? Coaching Opportunities - Progress can help you differentiate between long-term patterns and anomalies.
3. Next, zero in on the underutilized. Consider questions for context: Were they on vacation? Are they onboarding or upskilling? Have they expressed experiencing issues lately?
4. Additional hours may be required to address training gaps, particularly in technology-related areas. View an individual’s Personal Insights to help answer questions like: Are team members leveraging the appropriate technologies? Are they distracted? What could be leading to the distractions or lack of focus? What do their work habits look like?
5. When burnout is pervasive throughout a team, it can indicate broader issues. If you see burnout across a team, refer to Focus & Collaboration to understand time allocation and sources of inefficiency.
6. Refer to Benchmarks & Goals to guide teams to a healthier workload balance. Within Benchmarks & Goals, you can adjust Productivity, Focus, and Collaboration goals and track the team’s progress toward a healthier workload balance.

Managing a remote or hybrid workforce 

1. Begin by viewing Organization Insights to see monthly and quarterly trends in productivity goal attainment and utilization levels. A sustained shift in either metric may correlate with changes in workplace models or staffing.  The Stats by Team report provides a side-by-side view of productivity and utilization, helping to determine whether teams can achieve their goals while maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
2. If you would like more insight, you can view Productivity Achievement to see how individuals spend their time. Inconsistent usage across categories may suggest coaching opportunities, changes to remote or hybrid work policies, or additional training needs.
3. Review Focus & Collaboration to gain insight into remote or hybrid team members’ ability to focus throughout the day. You can also reference Coaching Opportunities - Efficiency to see team members with low productivity efficiency and get recommendations to help them regain time and achieve a better work-life balance.
4. Interested in understanding how remote work could be contributing to burnout? Reference Workload Balance to identify overutilized and underutilized team members. Click on an individual's name to understand their work habits and spot signs of potential burnout before it becomes a bigger problem.
5. For managers with both remote and in-office team members, refer to Team Comparison to compare the impact of collaboration and multitasking on teams' productive, focused time in and out of the office.
6. Guiding your team toward increased productivity is easiest when clear goals are set, and progress can be shared. Consider adjusting productivity goals within Benchmarks & Goals.

Measuring and managing productivity 

1. Reference Organization Insights to see how your team is performing against their productivity goals and compare their performance to that of the organizational average. The Stats by Team report displays team productivity alongside utilization levels, enabling you to assess the balance between performance and well-being.
2. In cases of significant changes in productivity trends (increases or decreases), refer to Focus & Collaboration to better understand these changes. Coaching Opportunities - Focus makes it easy to identify team members who struggle to focus on their work due to excessive meeting time, distractions from messaging applications, or frequent multitasking.
3. Viewing activity trends over time is a helpful way to manage productivity. Review Productivity Achievement for additional information about trends over the course of weeks or months. Coaching Opportunities - Progress can also help you detect productivity patterns.
4. Guiding your team toward increased productivity is easiest when clear goals are set, and progress can be shared. Consider adjusting productivity goals in Benchmarks & Goals.

Balancing workloads

1. Ensuring the even distribution of work across a team can reduce burnout risk, increase employee engagement, and support retention efforts. Use Workload Balance and Coaching Opportunities - Utilization to quickly identify which employees are over- or underutilized. Coaching Opportunities can help you differentiate between long-term patterns and anomalies, and zero in on team members at the highest risk of burnout.
2. Analyze employee work capacity using historical data in Workload Balance - Capacity Planning to determine where to better distribute workloads among team members in the future. This can be particularly helpful after a reduction-in-force (RIF) or reorganization. You can also leverage these insights on an ongoing basis for quarterly or biannual resource planning, including headcount allocation, and to help make a case for hiring new Full-Time Employees (FTEs) or contractors if team members are over capacity.
3. Navigate to Workload Balance to see how utilization levels fluctuate. Consider the unique circumstances that may be affecting utilization trends (e.g., specific deadlines, high-utilization projects, and new hire onboarding).
4. Understand how efficiently your team is working with Focus & Collaboration. This dashboard provides key insights into factors such as excessive screen time, distractions, or attention shifts that may contribute to unhealthy utilization levels.
5. Finally, refer to Technology Utilization - Adoption to view which tools employees use most. This allows you to see whether technology use is helping or hindering productivity, as particularly high or low activity in specific categories might indicate inefficient processes, training needs, or sources of distraction.  

Streamlining technology usage

1. To understand if technology is being used efficiently and effectively, start with Technology Utilization  - Overview to see which applications and websites your team uses most frequently.
2. The intentional use of technology is crucial to ensure employees work efficiently and to validate the necessity and value of technology investments. Technology Utilization - Top Changes will display any increases or decreases in usage, helping you identify areas of misalignment or improper tool use.
3. Technology Utilization - Adoption displays individual user activity for each technology category, providing insight into the technology habits of specific team members. If particular individuals are not using certain technologies as effectively as others, this may indicate a skills gap and a need for additional training.
4. Understand what is causing your team’s attention to shift by navigating to Focus & Collaboration and reviewing the Top Apps/Sites used by the team to collaborate and/or where multitasking occurs regularly, thus affecting their ability to focus.

Ensuring operational efficiency and compliance

1. You can begin with the Productivity Achievement to understand how much time is spent on productive or unproductive activities and to review team metrics and individual activity details compared to team goals. Review Coaching Opportunities on the Coaching Opportunities - Efficiency to identify team members with low productivity efficiency and get recommendations to help limit distractions and reduce time spent on non-business activities.
2. In the Technology Utilization - Adoption section, examine which tools employees use to determine whether technology use is helping or hindering productivity. Particularly high or low activity in specific categories might indicate inefficient processes, sources of distraction, or a need for additional training.
3. For a more general understanding of which tools are being used most and least often, review the Technology Utilization.
4. Review the Focus & Collaboration to understand which apps, websites, and activities pose risks. 

Improving team focus and communication

1. Understanding individual communication styles is crucial when evaluating whether communication habits are effective and efficient or contribute to unnecessary distraction. Start by reviewing Productivity Achievement to understand your team’s use of collaboration tools such as Slack and Zoom, compared with other categories.
2. Team members with Coaching Opportunities on Coaching Opportunities - Focus often spend a disproportionate amount of their productive time collaborating or multitasking, which takes away from time for focused work. (Note that expected Focus Time varies based on an employee’s role. To ensure that Coaching Opportunities reflect the expectations for your team, adjust the Focus Time goal in Benchmarks & Goals.) Reference Coaching Opportunities - Focus on getting advice on how to help employees minimize distractions and reclaim time in their schedules.
3. Navigate to the Focus & Collaboration section to better understand whether these activities are helping or hindering productivity. Compare which apps or websites contribute to attention shifts, with an explicit focus on two-way communication via digital collaboration tools such as meeting software, chat, and messaging. This report can also be used to identify any other sources of distractions.
4. Lastly, review the Technology Utilization - Top Changes to identify any sudden changes in activity categories. You might look for an increase or decrease in communication tool usage to understand the degree to which your team is collaborating versus working independently. When new goals and expectations have been established regarding the use of collaboration tools, this report can be a helpful tool for assessing change.

This article provides frameworks for people managers to interpret and act on data insights in dashboards that utilize Insights, helping to address several common use cases. For additional guidance on navigating the product or understanding workforce analytics in your account, please explore the resources in ActivTrak Academy or contact your Customer Success Team.

Learn more

• Understanding Live Data and Insights
• Coaching Opportunities
• How to Set Goals in ActivTrak
• Insights Configuration
• Insights Email Subscriptions