The Role of Employee Data in the New Normal

Employee data tracking was already a concern before COVID-19 hit, for employers who wanted to get a better read on their employees' skills levels, support needs, and engagement with the enterprise.

But when the pandemic arrived and employees made the change to remote work, it sparked a new desire to monitor employee performance and productivity. Managers and executives felt nervous about employees' work ethic while they're working from home, plus they wanted to be able to identify workers who need coaching for their sales calls, for example, or are struggling to master a new WFH tool without a tech team to hand.

"When COVID-19 hit, we found that within the first month, 16% of companies put new tracking software on the laptops of their remote employees," said Brian Kropp, group vice president for Gartner's HR practice. By July, the number had risen to 26%.

The need to surveil didn't end with the return to the office. Employers turned to track software to monitor employee health when they came back to in-person work, ensure social distancing, and avoid overcrowding in shared areas, as well as continuing to monitor productivity, activity, and performance.

While the decision to track employee data in the new normal stems from a concern for employee safety and capabilities, there's a risk that it could cross the line into intrusiveness. Additionally, if employee monitoring isn't handled carefully from beginning to end, you risk breaking privacy regulations, angering workers, and producing confusing and unreliable results that don't serve any real purpose.

Here are some best practices for tracking employee data in a way that produces meaningful insights while keeping everyone happy.

1. Be transparent

The golden rule is to be open about everything you're doing. Inform workers about exactly what data you'll be collecting and how you'll be collecting it, what you'll do with their data, how and for how long you'll store it, and what your practices are if you encounter any behavior that may be illegal.

It's best to inform yourself about your obligations under relevant data privacy regulations before you create a data-tracking program. For example, there are laws governing where an employer can install video cameras, and when an employer becomes a mandated reporter.

You also need to ask employees permission to install software like keylogging and screen imaging software or to collect their internet history. Ideally, include the conditions and capabilities of employee data tracking in their labor contracts, so that everything is written down.

2. Set up live data updates

The right tools give you the agility to tap into live employee data and delve into it in multiple ways. Frequently, the connection to Tableau is too slow for cloud analytics deployments to make full use of real-time employee datasets, leaving data science teams to work around delayed data dumps, adding more extracts whenever they need another view, which is a cumbersome and slow way to work.

You want your analysts to be able to draw on all the data they need at will, view real-time data updates, and enrich data so they can drill down from any angle. That requires a cloud data warehouse and Tableau performance tuning for a fast connection to Tableau that can support live data analysis.

3. Set goals for employee tracking programs

First consider what you want to achieve with employee data, to make sure that your data tracking practices don't inadvertently work against your aims. For example, if you're investigating employees' ability to work together as a team, measuring individual productivity will encourage "lone wolf" behavior.

Or if you're concerned about employee performance while working from home, measure overall productivity rather than the hours and minutes they spend at their computer each day. Gathering data that tracks only time "at" work, rather than work completed, could teach your employees to focus primarily on appearing to be present, rather than working efficiently and effectively.

4. Raise your security standards

Whenever you gather data, you run the risk that it could be hacked and stolen by malicious actors. Your employees are likely to be nervous about this possibility, so put strong security in place to protect your tracking tools, data storage, and analytics tools. Share your security measures with your employees to reassure them that their data isn't vulnerable to cybercrime.

5. Put your data to work

Lots of businesses are good at gathering data but aren't so great at using it effectively once they have it. Employee data tracking isn't just about the data you gather, but what you do with it afterward.

Use effective data storage platforms and data pipelines to integrate your datasets with external analytics, so you can run a deeper analysis. Collate data into dashboards and visualizations to apply it to identify bottlenecks in processes, and ways to remove friction from cross-departmental interactions and individual workflows.

Employee data tracking can be effective

The right tools and practices make it possible to implement employee data tracking that's effective and useful for your business strategy goals. By defining your aims for the process, being open about your data collection, securing employee datasets, using visualizations and analytics tools, and working with live data to produce meaningful insights that help make your organization more productive and a better place to work.