IT Leaders: Measuring and driving productivity for remote workers is in our DNA, and we’re here to help you as you navigate this new — and likely stressful — situation. To help you through these tough times, we are offering a free 30-day trial of Productiv so that you can quickly start understanding your organization’s current collaboration and productivity. To learn more, contact us here! 

Has the spread of COVID-19 made remote work the new reality for your company? While working from home is not a new concept, most companies have never dealt with a partially or fully remote workforce. As millions of employees stay home, continued employee productivity is the new C-suite priority. Business-critical questions, like  “Are we seeing a decrease in employee productivity?” or “Are my teams able to get their work done at home?” need answers. 

One of the key indicators of remote work productivity is employee engagement with remote collaboration applications, such as messaging and chat applications (Microsoft O365 Teams, Slack, and others), video conferencing applications (Zoom, Webex, BlueJeans, Skype For Business), file sharing applications (Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, Microsoft O365 Sharepoint).

In a world where every company has a remote workforce and every remote employee uses SaaS applications to work collaboratively, it’s never been more important for IT leaders to understand and influence changes in employee engagement with remote collaboration applications.

Understanding the effects of “work from home” on productivity

Here are some questions to ask:

• Is there a noticeable change in how people are using applications? Are they consuming information but not acting as promptly as they would otherwise?
• Are teams collaborating across the organization? Are there more meetings happening over Zoom, Teams, Webex, etc? Are employees turning video and screen-sharing on to maintain strong engagement during meetings? Has employee usage of messaging applications increased to take the place of face-to-face chats?
• Have there been changes in how people are using essential applications? For each functional area, essential applications such as Salesforce for Sales or ServiceNow for IT, should retain strong engagement regardless of employee location.  Has anything changed?

What matters most: trends in remote collaboration application engagement

At Productiv, we help our enterprise customers manage their SaaS applications and measure the associated impact applications have on productivity. Productiv data shows that in the six weeks since COVID-19 became a rapidly growing global issue,

>50% 

Week-over-week increase in engagement in remote collaboration applications

20%

Week-over-week increase in number of online meetings 

40%

Week-over-week increase in number of employees sharing video in these meetings

This indicates that remote collaboration is certainly helping a lot of companies maintain their employee productivity as teams work from home. However, we see that there is often room for improvement to bring employees even closer together.

Measuring and tracking this engagement data is critical in order to understand whether productivity is positively or negatively impacted by remote work. It can not only show you what’s working, but more importantly, also quickly identify what isn’t working. 

For example: If a few teams or functions are not using video conferencing, is it because of lack of training, lack of access, network bandwidth? Or is it a broader change management and cultural question?

How Productiv can help you understand your company’s employee productivity

With Productiv, you can analyze granular, contextual data on what employees are doing in SaaS applications after they log in, and understand trends in employee engagement with their SaaS applications. This data empowers them to define what actions to take, to increase employee productivity and help them get their work done. 

With Productiv, our customers track and share:

• Engagement insights across applications: You can see if employees are using the collaboration applications you want them to use. Are those applications serving their intended purpose by bringing employees closer together? What types of collaboration patterns are being created across teams, by application? 
• Engagement insights by feature and team. You can analyze engagement changes by function, location, or custom segments. This enables you to share the right level of detail with functional leaders, so they can mobilize their teams if engagement doesn’t match expectations.
• Notifications. You can see daily or weekly changes in engagement metrics by application. For example: number of employees adopting Zoom and using screen sharing, sending messages on Microsoft Teams, managing Salesforce opportunities, and more.

With Productiv engagement data visualizations, you can see trends at the feature level for all your SaaS apps. The below company has seen Zoom daily engagement go up in the last few weeks. Yet, the black line – shared video in meeting – is still about half of the red line – attended meeting – meaning that only 50% of users are using video.

Considering that employees may be missing out on stronger, deeper conversations if they’re working remotely without video interaction, this engagement arms you with the data needed to report on change in how employees are using applications, whether teams are collaborating across the organization, and any changes in how people use core applications. This strengthens the partnership between IT and the C-Suite, and enables IT to influence the productivity of a totally remote workforce.

Measuring and driving productivity for remote workers is in our DNA, and we’re here to help you as you navigate this new, and likely stressful situation. To help you through these tough times, we are offering a free 30-day trial of Productiv so that you can quickly start understanding your organization’s current collaboration and productivity. To learn more, contact us here!