The Secrets to Boosting Remote-Team Productivity and Performance

BY Stephanie Reed | June 12, 2024

To attract talent, employers need to offer remote and hybrid work, yet also need to create innovative arrangements that work for both the individual employees and the organization. Employees tend to think they're more productive working from home, yet research indicates that's not always the case. How to bridge the gap and ensure optimal performance?

“Leaders need to know how to support these distributed workforces in ways that don’t just ensure that they’re physically at work every day, but that they’re performing their best in a sustainable way,” said Sarah Altemus, productivity lab manager at ActivTrak. “This will be a real differentiator for organizations,” she said during a From Day One webinar.

ActivTrak provides interactive dashboards and modern software to help employers and managers gain insight into maximizing remote and hybrid workplace productivity. These tools help measure utilization, identify signs of individual burnout, summarize daily and weekly goal progress, and develop more balanced workloads.

Leah Ivory, solution consultant at ActivTrak discussed key dashboards and reports that  provide employers and their managers with the tools to identify key results areas, measure individual productivity, measure team utilization, and spot opportunities to reestablish workload balance and engagement.

ActivTrak’s software integrates direct email communication to foster coaching discussions among managers and individual team members to strategize performance plans and solutions to engagement challenges.

Their one-stop dashboard provides a 30,000-foot organizational and team management system using graphs and charts that can be broken down by department, region, or group. It should be referred to daily to track engagement levels in real-time and over the previous 30-day period to measure goal progress. Users can also see team productivity metrics for every member and weekly utilization trends. Other insights include workload balance reports, coaching and personal insights, and more.

These innovative tools help strategize high productivity in remote and hybrid settings. In 2024, most businesses have adapted to offering remote and hybrid work to keep talent. However, without referring to data there is no assurance that investing more in remote or hybrid work policies will be sustainable.

Employers often omit key insights by looking at traditional outputs that deliver results like production, revenue, and quality. Altemus says that insights into the inputs, like how employees work, how to use technology, how processes are adapted, and how training influences behavior, offer valuable insights into optimizing remote and hybrid work performance combined with output insights.

Sarah Altemus of ActivTrak led the From Day One webinar (company photo)

“What happens when we don’t track the inputs is we put ourselves in a position where maybe we overhire, and when we overhire, we’ll have low utilization elsewhere in the organization. We buy technology that goes underutilized and have higher technology costs as a result of it.”

Analytical tools revealing personal insights get to the root of the inputs: they identify who is overworking or underworking, who works better and where, and more information that gives employers and managers the opportunity to address the oncoming burnout or disengagement of a team member. Goals can be restructured and more personalized to improve productivity.

The ability for managers to access the personal insights of every individual team member presents a highly personalized one-on-one coaching opportunity to strategize a performance plan supporting their upward mobility based on their projects, location where their productivity is the most efficient, or restoring their workload balance.

“We’re really committed to being an employee-centric tool, empowering employees with their own data or providing the right level of information to the right level of people in the organization. We’re making sure that executives have access to the data they need for decision-making and managers are able to be effective,” said Altemus.

Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, ActivTrak, for sponsoring this webinar. 

Stephanie Reed is a freelance news, marketing, and content writer. Much of her work features small business owners throughout diverse industries. She is passionate about promoting small, ethical, and eco-conscious businesses.

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Some say high turnover is simply the cost of doing business, and for many industries, that will always be the case. But the numbers tell a different story. Disengaged workers cost the world economy $8.8 trillion in lost productivity, according to a 2023 report from Gallup.“A number like this shows that the opportunity cost of not investing in the employee experience fully outweighs the investment that you would make. 8.9 trillion dollars [is] 10% of the world’s economy. That’s a staggering number to think about,” said Josh Parente, the director of sales at LineZero. Parente spoke about the cost of employee disengagement, and how to re-engage them during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Salt Lake City conference.Doing Employee Engagement WellLineZero is passionate about the employee experience: “We live our values of ‘People Matter.’” “We focus on building and enhancing the employee experience through technology,” said Parente. LineZero has a long-term partnership with Meta’s Workplace and current partnership with Workvivo, and they’ve taken that experience to new organizations they work with. “Our objective when we work with a lot of our partners is to act as an extension of their organizations. We work with our partners to help them build and deploy their employee experience through technology.”Parente says they start with an employee’s experience from day one, “not just throughout maturity.” They focus on that starting point and “continue to push that positive momentum throughout the lifecycle [of the employee].” HR professionals and leaders should think about how connected their employees are to the mission and whether or not they're “excited and inspired” to clock in every day.During an impromptu survey with the audience, Parente sussed out a few key items that highlighted the lack of employee engagement and what companies are doing about it. Building trust turned out to be the number one challenge attendees were facing in their organizations. Email was how they were dealing with it. And, budget was one thing they'd increase to mitigate disengaged employees, if a “genie” was available. “Investing in the employee experience leads to 43% less turnover, an 81% reduction in absenteeism and a 20% increase in productivity. So if we’re looking at the budget and we’re looking at the opportunity cost, not investing far outweighs the cost of actually making the investment.”Slide from Parente's presentation, highlighting statistics shared When asked whether the above statistics shocked anyone, not a single hand went up. “80% of employees feel lonely. 3 out of 5 are burnt out. These are statistics that clearly articulate that we are facing a massive problem when it comes to the labor market today. So the question is, what are we going to do about it?”Looking back at the Great Resignation of 2022, the data paints a clear picture. Many boomers took early retirement, while millennials left their jobs in droves. But one statistic stood out to Parente. “Of the millennials that turned over during the 2022 Great Resignation, 47% of them were high performers.” That’s a big deal. “High performers outperform the average employee at a rate of four to one, and they make up about 15% of your organization.”If companies want to build strong cultures and retain top talent, they need to invest in the employee experience—especially for those high performers because they will help drive the employee experience and "push the [company] culture forward." Millennials, on average, change jobs every two to three years, meaning another wave of turnover is coming. “There’s a good opportunity here for us to start diving into ways to stop this mass turnover, especially with our high performers,” Parente said.Parente shared another chart inspired by Simon Sinek’s work with Navy SEALs. The takeaway? “The high performance, low trust person—this is a toxic team member. Even though they’re driving high performance, they would sooner select somebody that has low performance, high trust over somebody who has high performance, [low] trust.”Parente's slide on the relationship between trust and performance Take that to heart: The most elite teams prioritize trust over raw talent.Encouraging the Entrepreneur to be an IntrapreneurAccording to a chief people officer at a major enterprise Parente and LineZero works with, “Within the U.S. economy, [that company] [does] a really good job of inspiring and encouraging entrepreneurship,” the officer said. But when companies invest in employee experience, they don’t just keep workers—they create “intrapreneurs,” employees who think like entrepreneurs but stay within the company.The key is investing in high-trust employees.“Those high trust categories are those intrapreneurs that you want to encourage within your organization,” Parente said. “Those are the 15% that you want to continue to keep and continue to encourage to be part of the culture.” The solution Parente says is better technology. Right now, organizations juggle multiple platforms—productivity suites, HR systems, endless apps—but they don’t talk to each other. “What if we had one? One that connected everybody, our cultures, our productivity tools, and our HR systems? The truth is, we have that at our fingertips today.”Yet, many companies still rely on outdated communication methods. “Email is still number one." But mass emails with critical company updates? They get buried. “I don’t know if you guys read them, but they usually fall to the bottom of my inbox.”Parente says we all need to move in a different direction. “Legacy and top down communications [are] something that showed hierarchy. It showed clear efficiency, but it's not effective. It’s not inspiring, it’s not empowering our employees and our team members to go out and be entrepreneurs for the business.”As organizations look to the future, the way they communicate and engage employees must evolve. Creating an environment where employees feel encouraged, not overlooked, when sharing ideas is (or should be) the future. “If we’re not evolving and moving our organization forward, those statistics are going to stay at 60% of burnout. They’re going to stay at 80% of loneliness,” Parente said. “I don’t know about you, but if I go into work and I know that 80% of my coworkers feel lonely. That’s not an inspiring thing. We're not inspiring change. 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Prioritizing Benefits That Drive Impact for Your Employees: A Successful Case Study

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