How Managers Can Use Data To Become Better Leaders
Data has become an essential part of how businesses operate, informing nearly every decision made by organizations of all sizes in the majority of sectors. Data, when properly contextualized, can be used to improve relationships with customers and find new ones, increase sales with target demographics, improve marketing campaigns, track social media interactions, predict future economic trends, and so much more.
The importance of data in business will only continue to rise in coming years, but the key isn’t just having the data, it’s critical to put it into the necessary context. After all, your employees are human and humans are complex - you need to be able to understand what influences the data and how it can inform your leadership.
With the power of contextualized productivity intelligence data at your fingertips, you can become a stronger leader with the ability to make decisions more confidently, better understand how your employees operate on a day-to-day basis, and be ready for open and transparent conversation with your workforce. Managers become more effective leaders when they have qualitative, contextualized data that they can use to make good decisions for their team and the company.
Hold up - what are contextualized data and productivity intelligence?
Before we go too much further, let’s decode some business jargon. Contextualized data is data which is presented, usually in reports, with trends or comparisons that give it meaning. For example, if you report on the number of followers a business has gained on Instagram, that means nothing on its own. You “contextualize” it when you add in comparisons to follower growth year-over-year, demographics of the followers, and so on.
Productivity intelligence is similar to business intelligence in that it provides “intelligence” about productivity levels. In fact, productivity intelligence is a subset of business intelligence, as it is a bucket of data that figures into reporting that is usually done in that area.
Strong leaders are more important than ever before
The past year has been difficult for everybody, and it’s led to a great deal of stress and anxiety. In order to get through these tough times unscathed, businesses need strong leaders who have the ability to steer their employees in the right direction, create confidence in the workforce, improve morale, and establish happier and healthier work environments that give employees a sense of community they can rely on. Without strong leadership, it’ll be nearly impossible for businesses to flourish in the recovery economy.
That’s exactly the reason why leaders need to use the resources available to them to improve their leadership style. Data provided by productivity intelligence can help managers and supervisors become better at their jobs by offering an easier way to spot trends, identify red flags and opportunities, and know when their workforce is thriving and when it could use a boost. Productivity intelligence solutions like Prodoscore let leaders go confidently into the unknown.
Prodoscore: Contextualized data about your workforce
Prodoscore uses machine learning and AI to measure daily activity in various cloud-based business applications, including office suites like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, UCaaS, CRM solutions, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, DocuSign, Slack and many others. This activity is then used to generate a unique productivity score for each employee, as well as actionable analytics to measure productivity and inform your decision making.
It’s not enough to simply have data about how much time John from accounting spent in Google Sheets or Cathy from sales spent in Salesforce CRM. To become a better leader, you need to be able to understand what those metrics mean - they need context. High and low productivity scores alone, for example, aren’t enough to go on. In order to truly understand and appreciate how people are working, you need to know what’s influencing them, when they’re at their most (or least) productive, how their recent performance compares to historical trends, how their managers are faring, and how they stack up to the rest of the team.
Prodoscore uses easy-to-navigate managerial dashboards that offer this type of contextual data about your workforce, making it easier than ever before to identify trends and top performers, understand which teams are most effective, and visualize productivity across your workplace. With this information at your disposal, you’ll be far better equipped to make decisions that will boost engagement, assist workers experiencing (or nearing) burnout or who have low morale, improve employee retention, and streamline the experience of your employees. Prodoscore data can also be used to enhance your business’s coaching processes, leading to a far stronger workforce.
Productivity intelligence creates major opportunities for leadership
Becoming a stronger leader is easy with access to contextualized data. Prodoscore’s manager dashboards give you a deep dive into how the organization overall, as well as each employee has performed in a given day compared to other days, weeks, and months. Employee specific information can be used by leaders to identify significant dips in performance and find out the root cause - is an employee suffering from high stress or anxiety? Have they reached their breaking point in terms of burnout? Are they leveraging the workplace technologies provided to them? Is it possible that something else is going on? Prodoscore makes it easy to seek out the answers to these questions and more.
Seeing information about which office tools employees are using most, which ones they aren’t using, when they’re most productive throughout their day, and when their productivity tends to drop, you can work with them to do things like encourage and increase adoption of core apps and allow them to create work schedules centered around hours of the day when they find themselves to be most productive.The solution makes identifying top performers seamless, letting you reward exceptional performers and making it easier to replicate their success by learning what they’re doing right and how you could apply these lessons to other team members.
These insights are especially useful in a distributed work environment, giving managers the visibility they need, and creating opportunities for check-ins.
Becoming a better leader is easier than ever before thanks to productivity intelligence data. Using Prodoscore, leaders can finally understand exactly how their workforce is operating on a day-to-day basis, identify red flags that could suggest burnout or attrition, spot trends in how and when your employees are at their best, and make decisions based on data you can rely on with the goal of boosting employee engagement, increasing retention, streamlining the employee experience, and enhancing coaching. Become a stronger leader today by getting in touch with a member of our team.
