As most workforce moves to remote working scenarios permanently, organizations are looking for newer ways to meaningfully engage the workforce as well as ensure their well-being. What we call office is now partially shifted to the digital realm. How do we know what our people are facing, as they digitally come to work every day, add value and sign off? How do we know that the enterprise is not becoming intellectually and physically taxing for people to be working effectively?

Social engagements have classically been the setting – in which observed, felt or reported (by self or others) people behaviors have been useful in helping people both from a well-being as well as developmental perspectives. However, the digital age that is shaping now, protects the organizations from doing that. Then what are the tools today, that may get utilized for organizations to predict and take care of the well-being of their employees or associates both from a developmental and well-being perspective. To further add, in a more cost-effective as well as continuous manner.

Workplace and social analytics can play a big role in predicting employee well-being, productivity and developmental requirements. Social patterns and workplace analytics tools powered by passive data analysis, can help organizations aggregate distinctive data sources and then use trained artificial intelligence and machine learning models to generate meaningful insights for different applications viz. the performance, productivity, well-being, initiative and learning requirements of the individuals.

In that sense the workplace analytics tools can turn a whole lot of passive information through trained algorithmic models into actionable insights. However, before jumping on standard solutions, organizations need to take a deeper look at the behavioral science dimensions, typically lacking in the direct data based analytic tools.

Which direction is workplace analytics moving:

As realities for workers and organizations change, where can you leverage the workplace social analytics? For example, with workplace analytics, it is possible to identify collaboration, innovation, employee self-motivation, well-being and immersion, in addition to classical use cases viz. employee engagement and productivity, those that were mostly powered by surveys and questionnaires.

Powered by usage of collaboration tools and generation of a variety of digital information on these, viz. voice, video, text, documents and a variety of information exchange, tasks completed and decisions taken data available, modern tools can be utilized by using algorithms trained through AI and ML, that may help you predict behaviors in the workplace as also diagnose both individual and group level issues that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. This provides organizations an opportunity to be predictive rather reactive in approach to creating better employee experience, immersion and well-being. The information can help organizations address the “segment of one” – uniquely addressing the individual requirements.

The Big Shift in workplace analytics:

While classically organizations have looked for platforms that can help generate employee data, that may then be analyzed for employee insights. With workplace analytics tools now, the greatest shift is from platforms to gather information, to behavioral science insights in curating, analyzing and reporting information. Looking for cues of behaviors that can shape an actionable insight at an individual, group or organization levels is now possible.

#1 IMMERSION: Find the level of self-directedness amongst individuals and teams that can help you predict autonomous behavior, very important to digital workplaces. Behavioral Science has elaborately researched the self-determination concept which should power such analytics.

#2 WELL-BEING: Know about your employees physical, mental and emotional well-being state and create interventions that help enhance well-being. Well-being has a direct correlation with self-determination, that powers immersion.

#3 SENTIMENT: Have the metrics on sentiment with respect to work, workplace and manager / leaders and the ecosystem of your organization. Look at the sentiment from the point of view of trust in the organization’s intent and trust on the leaders.

#4 EXPERIENCE: Get a pulse on your practices and employee experiences from a remote and physical workplace perspective and is it enabling the employees to be self-directed in their approach.

#5 TALENT: Build a view on your talent pipeline at an individual, team and organization level, from a competency-based perspective – that enables the talent planning from career, learning, growth and succession perspectives.

Right analytics provides an organization a great deal of flexibility in planning the right interventions with the right impact on the people imperatives. The subject matter and wise usage of workplace and social analytics algorithms can therefore provide a great deal of clarity on what is measured, how it is measured and how that insight is visualized to facilitate the decision-making process. Visualizing behavior sciences based solutions, can therefore helps you answer issues pertaining to the workforce effectiveness and plan a better digitally-enabled culture focused on well-being and immersion from an employee point of view and right talent from an organizational point of view.

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