People analytics is one of the core tools HR can use to gain visibility into the employees and workplace around them. HR must learn to use this data to succeed in the future of work or risk working blindly, causing their organization to face unnecessary setbacks and outdated business processes.
For years now, functions like IT, finance and marketing have defined, tracked and achieved their goals with data-informed decision making. Meanwhile, HR have faced significant challenges in completing large workforce transformations with no access to data to inform their strategy. People analytics serves to solve this gap in data, especially now that the majority of businesses operate under hybrid and remote work models.
For HR leaders in 2022, there is perhaps no greater challenge and use case for people analytics, than managing remote employee burnout. To ensure they’re taking the right approach to combating it, HR professionals will need to learn how to harness people analytics and gain a better understanding of how employee burnout presents itself in their workforce.
The state of employee burnout in the remote workplace
Managing employee burnout is a top priority for many companies. It impacts your employees’ mental health, causes them to go into survival mode and is not conducive to high-quality work. Need proof? Employees reporting burn out cost organizations $3,400 for every $10,000 due to:
- Low productivity
- High turnover
- Knowledge loss
- And cost to replace talent if they choose to quit their job
But how do you know if an employee is burnt out if you can’t see them? As a leader in an in-person environment, you could walk around the office and see how employees are experiencing work by their body language or small talk around the office. In a remote workplace, it can be difficult if you have little to no interaction with them, or if their camera is turned off during meetings. When this is the case, your only insights on how they’re feeling come from occasional feedback they provide, their voice in a meeting, or inconsistent indicators such as survey responses.
So the question becomes: how do you pinpoint burnout BEFORE the employee has reached their “point of no return”?
People analytics you can use to track remote employee burnout
Pattyrn’s people analytics platform recreates an in-person experience by looking across your technology stack so you can see how your employees are experiencing work in a remote environment.
More specifically, it aggregates and recognizes work patterns in digital tools like:
- Microsoft Office 365
- Google Workspace
- Slack
- Zoom
- Wrike
- Workfront
- Jira
- Github
- Salesforce
By arming you with this information, Pattyrn gives you insight into your employees’ projected stress levels with data on the source. Here’s how it works!
Workload
Firstly, you can see employee workloads in comparison to yours and the company at large to inform if you need to:
- Hire additional employees
- Limit or define the scope of their job
- Help them streamline inefficient processes
- Give them better resources or tools to get the job done
- Automate or integrate any of their digital tasks
Employee sentiment
What makes Pattyrn different from any other people analytics platform is that it calculates employee sentiment with its projected stress module. This is calculated using proven indicators that an employee is experiencing unproductive, stressful work.
You may recognize these symptoms of workplace anxiety yourself, which include:
- An increase in sick days, tardiness or absenteeism
- A high number of unanswered emails and messages
- A rise in emails, messages, notifications and calls
- A rise in logged working hours
- And so much more!
Want to learn more about how we calculate employee sentiment in a remote work environment? Get in touch with our team or request a demo with our product expert!
Meetings
Speaking of meetings, people analytics solve a common problem: your company is likely holding too many. New research shows that 70% of meetings are unproductive and only stop employees from getting meaningful work done, rather than helping them complete it with new guidance. These frequent meetings also contribute to “Zoom fatigue,” a significant factor in employee burnout.
To give you visibility into your company’s meeting trends, Pattyrn collects data from Zoom and Google Calendar to identify how much time employees spend in meetings every day and how it differs by employee, team, department and location.
Limiting excessive meetings is more challenging than it seems. This is because newly promoted managers are the largest contributor to the problem.
New managers, who are often an indicator of a healthy, scaling organization, hold 29% more meetings than experienced ones to connect with their team and get buy-in. Although this occurs for valid reasons, HR should inform incoming managers about the impact of meetings and their company meeting policies every time they promote a new one - a task most companies don’t remember.
This has become such a significant trend in today’s workplaces that 92% of employees view meetings to be costly and unproductive. To help you quickly curb this trend, Pattyrn’s people analytics shows you where there is an excess of meetings in your organization so you can reduce them.
To do this, you can see the amount of hours employees spend in meetings every week and view how this data fluctuates over a quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily basis. Viewing these people analytics across all teams and employees gives you insights you wouldn’t normally have easy access to.
You can view if specific departments and teams that shouldn’t be in many meetings have the time they need to complete deep work. Or if managers themselves are inundated by meetings, indicating too many clients, direct reports or that they themselves prefer scheduling meetings as a form of management.
Lastly, you can see which teams are in frequent meetings that last for over an hour, which are too long to engage employees throughout. This causes employees to daydream, become overwhelmed and multi-task, among other effects.
To effectively pick out which meetings to cut, use the above data to complete the following steps:
- Determine which teams and employees should not be in frequent client or internal meetings
- Review meeting protocols with new managers and managers that are shown to set many meetings
- Assess why managers are setting many meetings. Is their team not supporting them or communicating effectively? Come up with a solution to help the entire team function more productively with fewer meetings.
- Teach employees how to advocate for themselves using the meeting insights they gain on their workday from Pattyrn’s people analytics
- And curb all hour-long meetings
Your employees will thank you with more productive workdays!
Tasks
Pattyrn’s people analytics help reduce heavy employee workloads by helping them deprioritize admin and low-priority work for tasks that carry the most value and importance. Label tasks as low-, medium- or high-priority to guide employees on what to work on, and track how the prioritization improves their workload.
Project Blockers
Finally, Pattyrn shows a frequent source of employee stress: project blockers. See others' subtasks blocking which employees, and open the table to talk about how it’s holding back the overall project and what the solution is.
The result of using people analytics for employee burnout
Now you can engage with your top skilled workers BEFORE they are burnt out. You can build solid relationships based on trust because your workers know that you are there to support them. You’re able to efficiently allocate your time to the workers that need the support based on the data you receive. Meaning, you can spend more time with people that require a boost.
Want to learn more about Pattyrn’s people analytics and receive a demo of the platform? Get in touch with Sangeeta, our Pattyrn expert!