WorkMeter – ‘Eli Daniel Group’ success story
It seems like anywhere we go or whatever we do these days, we are being monitored and tracked. Soon the monitoring and tracking could come to your work computer.
A program called WorkMeter allows managers to track what websites employees log onto, what programs they use and how productive employees are as they go about their days.
“The idea behind WorkMeter is not about spying. The idea is to build a database or look at a performance of an employee from a time management perspective,” said Andre Angel, the Chairman of WorkMeter.
Angel said WorkMeter worked best when managers included employees in the process.
“Nobody is doing anything malicious. Employees want to work, want to improve what they’re doing, and if you give them that feedback, they improve,” Angel told CW 33 News.
Chris Lawson, the CEO of the staffing company The Eli Daniel Group in Allen, Texas, recently installed WorkMeter. Employees at first were less than enthused about the new software.
“I was a little concerned at first because I really thought it was going to be Big Brotherish, Chris and management looking over your shoulder wanting to know what you are doing every moment,” said Kendra Fox.
But the Eli Daniel Group included employees from the start, allowing each person to follow their own productivity with a dashboard on their computer.
“It’s not like it is me over your shoulder wondering what you are doing all of the time. It gives the individual the real time information,” said Lawson.
Fox believed WorkMeter was only as successful as how it was implemented.
“As long as they explain it right and kind of pitch it the right way and make sure their employees are on board and kind of including them in the process, then I think people will be OK with it,” said Fox.
Click here to watch the video
March 9, 2012 at 1:19 pm workmeter
Top 10 ways employees waste time at work
24/7 Wall St. looked at a number of workplace studies on how people spend time online, and found that most say employees with PCs spend 20-plus hours a week on the Web while at work—and about a quarter of that is for personal use. 24/7 Wall St. broke those 5 squandered hours down into the top 10 “time wasters”:
1. Social Networks: 1 hr, 14 min/week; apparently, 77% of employees who have access to Facebook from work check it at least once a day.
2. Online Games: 34 min/week
3. Email: 27 min/week
4. Portals like AOL, Yahoo!: 14 min/week
5. Instant Messaging: 13 min/week
How much time is spent watching pornography at work? It’s staggering. Follow this link for more information, or read what we think …
December 6, 2011 at 11:02 pm workmeter
Productivity is More Than Just a Mathematical Formula
Wikipedia defines “productivity” as a measure of output from a production process, per unit of input, and this is where the fundamental problem of the modern day business begins.
Without real & measurable business benefit as a subsequent output of labor input, then what you are measuring is simple activity & NOT “productivity”.
True productivity starts at “why”, gains momentum at “what” and accelerates on continuos & measured improvements.
The Power of “Why”
People don’t do what they’re told, people do as they believe! The way we exercise our thoughts are through actions, likewise we exercise our beliefs through engrained habits or behavioral patterns. Ever go on a road trip that you weren’t convinced was right for you? How did that workout for you? Were you enthusiastic about overcoming the challenges that appeared along the way? Did you look on the bright side of ever set-back?
“Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.” – John Fitzgerald Kennedy; A strong sense of purpose, something you can identify with, believe in.. is always a sure bet to get you enthusiastic about the journey your company is about to take you on. It’s purpose that gives you faith & courage to seek alternative paths and make proactive efforts to achieve your milestones faster. Purpose is the first key to engagement & commitment to excellence.. it’s the self imposed response to an employee who briefly asks themselves “why bother”.
What’s your company’s “why”and how do remind everyone every day of it? And this is just the 1st step..
The Direction of “What”
“If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.” – Steve Jobs; Follow-up strong purpose with a clearly articulated & understood vision, and your powerful formula is more than half-way there.
People more quickly propel themselves toward something they can visualize.. almost touch & feel.. than into a dark tunnel or foggy cloud. How quantifiable is your company’s vision? How absolutely clear is the short, medium & long terms goals / objectives of your organization.
What mechanisms are you using on a regular basis to remind people of what your vision is.. the end point of your journey’.. and most important, what are the regular (rhythmic) interval checks or pulse-checks that measure your progress and as well what’s left to achieve? Yet this is merely your 2nd step..
The power of metrics.. measurements & continuous improvements
What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done, because people don’t do what you EXPECT.. they do what you INSPECT!
That’s the reality of human nature, and to assume anything else is a guaranteed formula for disaster. If purpose (Mission) & vision need to be quantifiable, then even more so does execution. As Thomas Edison once said, ”Vision without execution is hallucination.” But how do you know that you’re executing? After-all, how do you know whether your teams are being “productive” or simply busy (activity)?
If you’ve got your act together in what regards setting & measuring against performance, how are you ensuring your team is continuously measuring progress and growing through key learning?
“Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is simply passing the time. Action with Vision is making a positive difference.” – Joel Barker.. Action with vision is measurable! It’s when you can identify whether employee’s behavioral patterns at work are producing business results. For this, you need to be able to measure activity that drives results and not just activity working on the applications or environments you’ve deemed productive. I can spend an entire day in a word processing application, just like I can in a spreadsheet, but unless I’m producing business results, it’s all just a hallucination.
On the contrary, in parallel to measuring where I’m investing my time, how many uninterrupted & focused work sprints I’m able to generate in a day, if i can associate my activity to quantifiable increases in business results.. then I can confidently state that I’m productive.
July 6, 2011 at 4:30 pm The Strategy Guy
How Facebook(ing) Can Improve Work Productivity
In a study dating back almost 2 years ago, Melbourne University’s department of Marketing & Management demonstrated how a workforce that takes planned work breaks with Facebook is actually 9% more productive.
The fundamentals behind why this works can be found in guaranteeing the appropriate strategy, effective communication & engagement principles so that a workforce can plan for success. It’s about finding the right rhythm & planning your 60-90 minute work sprints.
Social networks are NOT the problem
The problem most companies are facing today isn’t the Internet or Social Media, it’s the lack of effective Leadership. 86% o senior executive agree that the biggest challenge is to mobilize their workforce, yet 53% of staff are unable to explain their companies strategy. What’s wrong with this picture? Leadership is about setting direction & delegating, it’s about using a “story-telling cascade” to build a shared and compelling narrative about the need for change.. or the results you expect to achieve. The competitive advantage of the twenty-first century is increasingly derived from hard-to-copy intangible assets such as company culture and leadership effectiveness.
People Strategies First
Leveraging insight from Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage ; Charles Darwin’s observation that “the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment” may have become something of a cliché in the literature on change management, but it has never rung more true in the business world. The ability to manage an organization dynamically so that it can both shape its environment and rapidly adapt to it is becoming the most important source of competitive advantage in the twenty-first century. Success is about winning not just in the marketplace for customers, but also in the marketplace for talented employees.
The role of business in society is changing. As we work more and socialize less, the time we have left for traditional activities involving our family, our local community, and our religious institutions is declining. As a result, our sense of meaning and identity is increasingly derived from the workplace (our jobs) and the marketplace (the products and service we buy). The message is that talented employees are not content to be cogs in a machine geared to hitting quarterly performance numbers. They want to work in dynamic workplaces where they feel empowered to make meaningful, positive change happen.
You Can’t Manage What You Can Measure
Once you’ve got your people strategy effectively in place, what mechanisms will you use to measure active contribution toward company results? How will you address the 7 simple questions that drive your strategic plans; Who, What, When, Where, How, Why? And most importantly, how will you answer the always difficult “but Should we or Shouldn’t we?” questions?
By empowering your team with a solid Vision and aligning them around agreed strategies, you’ll also need to ensure a fine balance of productive work sprints coupled with recovery breaks.
Why not let them Facebook when you know you’re already getting he very best out of your people? What measurements do you have in place that give you confidence of how your team is engaging their available productive capacity?
June 27, 2011 at 12:39 pm The Strategy Guy
How-To Fix the Open Space Syndrome
Let’s be honest.. the advent of Open Space Offices had more to do with economics than productivity. That said, other than death & taxes, every challenge has a (or various) solution(s).
The current work environment provided by most employers who support an Open Space layout is highly unproductive for getting work done at work. Interruptions & easy distractions are only a few inconvenient truths of why an open space working environment can become highly unproductive. That’s what I call “Open Space Syndrome”.
Open spaces are economical solutions for housing employees, and in the right configuration can still gain effective transversal (cross functional area) awareness without compromising the concentration required to deliver effective results.
Here are some solutions I’ve found to help open spaces become more productive.
Focus Time
If you have to do work that requires focus & concentration, find a quite & unused space in or around your office building. The secluded corner table of the coffee shop downstairs, the park bench across the street, the conference room that’s not in use, the library down the street or even the office cafeteria during off-peak hours. These are all spaces that you can move to in order to get important work done.
The pre-requisit is that your management team has realized the benefit of fitting out the office with laptop computers connected to docking stations or keyboard, mouse & screens. Given the increased computing power of portable computers and the flexibility of cloud computing based storage solutions, Desktop computers are dinosaurs / anchors that just don’t cut it anymore.
Visual Hints
Have you ever seen an “on-air” sign in a radio or television station? Do you remember the last time you walked into a bank, took a number & headed to the information desk? Those are only a few practical reminders of things you can do in your open space office environment in order to get more work done. If you’re part of a work team, agree amongst yourselves a rotating “customer service” schedule to take questions and issues from other departments & functional areas. Make it visibly clear who’s “on-call” by placing a bright tennis ball on the screen of the person providing Customer Service.. or get even more creative and make-up a sign to hang somewhere visible.
Another effective tip is to put headphones on, even if you don’t want to listen to music, so that people will assume that you’re taking an online course, speaking on Skype or indeed focused on a task whilst listening to music.
Semi-Open Spaces
Glass partitioning works best to provide an open-plan feel and still be conducive to “noise” cancelation. Glass partitioning also provides the added benefit have creating more “white-board” space to draw up brilliant half-baked ideas & capture spur of the moment brainstorms.
In an earlier article this year, I highlighted how the MCI Group has developed a really inspiring open-plan workspace in their Zurich offices.
The above are only a few effective solutions & I’d like to hear yours. If you’re working in an open space & have found handy tricks to maximize your productive moments in-spite of the challenges, I’d love to hear / read your experiences.
June 20, 2011 at 9:21 am The Strategy Guy
How your business is slowly dying
Every business expert will agree that “you can’t manage what you cant’s measure”, yet most of you reading this post are slowly killing your companies prospects to profitably grow because you don’t have the appropriate measurements in place.
In your case, “the gap” is the space between your perception and reality. According to a recent survey conducted by 3S in 305 Iberian based mid-size companies, only 37% of senior executives categorized their companies as very good or excellent at executing strategy. When we scratched deeper below the surface, we found that more than 50% of employees were disengaged with their company’s strategy, and that 31% recognized they didn’t have the necessary measures in place to ensure effective execution of their strategies to reach required business results for success.
Flying Blind
76.8% of the companies admitted to flying blind (perception based), without the necessary performance measurements to determine if their strategies were successful or not. The same figure of 23% blamed the current economy as the cause that limits their capacity to grow.
With numbers that evident, you can only cringe at the wasted productive capacity, and it’s no wonder that companies are in the troubles they are in today. Imagine +76% of the planes in the sky flying around with no radar for day.. would you get on a plane that day? This is shear madness, yet having worked across 5 continents over the past 26 years, I can confirm this isn’t unique to Iberia, it’s just more severe here.
Flying with Radar
What are you currently doing to measure the performance & productivity of your team?
You don’t have to go immediately overboard and jump straight into a full fledged Human Performance Technology Program. You should start out slow.. take baby steps with a Productivity Management tool like WorkMeter. Easy to implement & even easier to use, it engages your employees in discovering how to transform learning into more productive habits. Unlike other “performance monitoring” tools, WorkMeter is an educative “performance analysis” tool, and the best one I’ve used to date that helps me quickly experience increased results. It’s employee friendly nature fosters internal healthy competitive growth & development without management having to step in. Once you set the strategy, your team does the work & the learning themselves.
Eliminate the Gap
Don’t hold your finger to the wind to figure out if a storm is coming! Plan purposefully with concrete data & facts that will have you better predict the future of your organization based on historical trends. Join the new era of empowered organizations that confidently determine their own future success based on solid metrics. The execution of an idea is always more important than the brilliance of the thought, so stop dreaming about being more productive and get down to measuring it so you can manage it.
The growth of an organization is simply the accumulated growth of the individual relationships that constitute it, and it now rests on your shoulders to eliminate the gap created by perception by empowering your employees with metrics (measurements) they can learn, develop & grow from.
June 6, 2011 at 2:43 pm The Strategy Guy
Internet usage & Productivity; Compliment or bitter rivalry?
Can you recall before the advent of the internet, and this is still true today in many public service locations, how you could walk into a workplace & spot at least 1/2 of the employees reading a newspaper or standing by the water-cooler in idle chatter?
Yes folks, before the internet came to be, companies already had productivity issues! All the internet did, as with every other positive aspect it also brought about, was accelerate what was already right or worng about our organizations.
The great debate is on.. and every man and his dog has an opinion, so let me share with you my own. The internet, like anything else in life, is only a distraction in the workplace if your organization lacks the disciplined effort to engage it’s key-stakeholders in the activities required for both employee & employer to succeed. The fact is that the internet is a significant & key enabler of innovation, including finding new ways to become more productive by sharing best practices. But don’t take just my word for it, let’s explore the messaging that’s prevelant out there today.
Surprise: Internet monitoring reduces Internet use
And if you declare a police state, putting armed officers on every street corner you’ll reduce crime. But is that what you really wanted? What’s your objective? To have people use the internet less or for them to be more produce more work that drives desirable results? If the latter is your choice, then focus on getting your team on-board with a sound game-plan for achieving success. Give them the skills, knowhow, resources & effective communication strategies that will keep them highly engaged, motivated & productive. The internet isn’t the real issue.. it’s more than likely that you’re just not doing a great job of motivating people to do the right things at the right time required to achieve success.
Social networking at work leads to productivity loss
So I guess when I last connected to someone on LinkedIn, which in turn resulted in a transaction where I was engaged to perform a key (remunerated) project, that wasn’t productive? Or when I tweeted a question about what best product / service to use in order to execute on a particular task.. and I received valuable feedback that reduced the chance of my wasting time on a product that someone else had already deemed poor.. I wasn’t really being productive? Social networking at work can only lead to productivity loss if your people aren’t focused & engaged, or don’t have the skill set / knowhow to leverage social networking to their benefit.
To Lee Fayer, and others alike who make claims that “social networking costs 14 billion pounds a year in lost work time”, I would say that you’re just looking for excuses to cover up ineffective people management & engagement. For the record, let me say that if your people are spending more than 1h per day on the likes of Facebook when “they should be working” (and this phrase is key), then you’ve got a management, motivation and or engagement issue.. and not an internet usage issue.
Why Your Employees Are More Productive When They Facebook at Work
The sciences of biology & psychiatry prove that human beings need recovery breaks intermingled with intense work segments in order to maximize their effectiveness & productivity. It’s a proven fact that when you allow people to perform completely unrelated tasks in-between work-tasks, they increase their focus and output as a consequence of reaching a higher state of concentration & throughput immediately following their break.
Dr. Brent Coker’s work entitled “Freedom to surf: workers more productive if allowed to use the internet for leisure” is more than just common sense, it can also be proven by the practical nature of the following factual diagram brought to us by our friends at WorkMeter.
Because you can’t manage what you can’t measure
As this graph shows, when a control element is introduced there is a natural tendency for reduced activity. Yet when the appropriate effective management tools, engagement principles & strategic initiative motivate a workforce, what you begin to witness is true productivity (driving company results) which can actually supersede previous levels of “activity”.
What are you focusing on these days? Activity which might not be directly contributing to desired results, or productivity by using the right empowerment & engagement principles that guarantee your team get’s on-board with your strategic plan?
Guest Blog by JC Duarte; The Strategy Guy
February 18, 2011 at 9:00 am The Strategy Guy
Quick Win Productivity Tip-of-the-Day; Digitalize
This morning’s bank experience… I’m not naturally organized when it comes to finical matters. That said, it doesn’t mean I can’t be great at it, it’s just going to take me extra effort, energy, a framework & discipline until it becomes a newly engrained habit. That’s how life works!
So when I went to my bank this morning to establish additional accounts (buckets) for segmenting & putting funds aside for my various obligations & plans, my digitalization strategy.. which I put into effect some years ago.. came into very productive use!
The Challenge
For whatever reason, my identity details in the bank records had expired, and without the physical documentation I would have had to come back another day.. wait in another line to be attended to.. and start explaining my needs all over again.
The Solution
Fortunately I’ve digitalized my life, so with the stroke of a few keys on my smartphone, tablet pc or Laptop (in this case laptop) I accessed my Dropbox account & promptly handed (emailed) over my previously scanned legal identity.
The Reward
What turned out to be a 1h exercise, which I initially estimated at 45m, could have been double or triple (including more inconvenient trips to the bank) had I not had all my relevant information at the (extended) tips of my fingers.
I don’t do back-ups anymore.. my working files (directories) in my laptop are permanently & instantly synced with Dropbox, which means anywhere in the world, from any device, I can access my information. I share files (or directories) with clients for immediate productivity. No longer do I need time-consuming file transfers or deal with e-mail limitations. This morning’s practical example is only one.. Dropbox & digitalization (virtualization) of a significant part of my life has given me more time for me to do the things that really matter to me.. providing me a significant increase in work-life balance.
How are you virtualizing? How are you digitalizing? If you’re not, then how are you still getting stuck in your traditional off-line world / frameworks? How are they empowering or limiting you?
Guest Blog by JC Duarte; The Strategy Guy
February 16, 2011 at 3:59 pm The Strategy Guy
HR Management 2.0
Human resources have been managed in much the same way for 30 years.
The environment has changed, the media has changed, the tools have changed, and this is producing effects that companies often do not know how to manage.
In the past the control was applied, nowadays you have to manage the privacy of the employee, the flexible working hours and the social benefits. In the past you had to manage the effort, now you have to manage the talent. In the past the industry was managed, and now people in offices are managed. Initiatives such as teleworking and flexible working hours, or pay for targets in these new environments are often very difficult or almost impossible to implement.
A new management 2.0 based on metrics will be required in order to confront this new paradigm. A policy of transparency and awareness regarding the employee’s contribution. An objective basis for management and decision-making that also respects the privacy of individuals.
We need new policies and adequate tools for present and future, to ensure continuous improvement and enabling emerging trends in human resources management.
Companies will have to continue adapting these new methodologies, unless they will be surprised by management problems, productivity, safety … etc.
WorkMeter provides the necessary assistance to start this transition and assist companies in implementing new methodologies and processes with HR. For a cost of less than 1% of an employee’s salary, and exceptional ROI (sometimes only 1 week), this productivity management platform enables metrics to be a transparent and objective concept, allowing many of the initiatives that this new human resources management is demanding, and also significantly improving the time management and productivity of employees.
January 31, 2011 at 2:28 pm workmeter
Have you ever thought about the impact that Christmas Holidays have on Productivity?
We all know that holidays are a great period, when families gather to spend more time together, people buy gifts for their loved ones, everyone is celebrating and the work productivity….decreases.
As an employee it;s normal for you to feel more tired at the end of the year and tend to daydream of holidays, Christmas parties or rest.
It is not a surprise that you