Workplace Strategy: All About the DataWorkplace Strategy: All About the Data
Workplace data can help guide return-to-office planning, but it's useless in a vacuum.
January 21, 2021
When discussing return-to-office strategies, workplace leaders are increasingly turning to one thing to ensure safety and a positive employee experience: data.
Thankfully, workplace and employee experience data is plentiful, coming from a range of sources. For instance, workplace analytics provider Humanyze earlier this month announced its Organizational Health Score (OHS), which measures an organization's health by analyzing data from the collaboration tools in use and smart office sensors. The OHS groups metrics on engagement, productivity, and adaptability, and compares them to an industry benchmark. Monitoring these numbers over time can inform HR practices, managerial decisions, and, yes, the return to office, Humanyze suggests.
While Humanyze provides a macro view of a workplace's health with OHS, other software vendors focus on the office space itself, providing data on things like room occupancy and density. Workplace management software company Robin offers a host of workplace analytics that can help an organization understand space utilization and how to make the most out of the conference room experience. Robin Return, a COVID-19 offering, targets safety concerns. It includes contact tracing, distance planning, and the ability to create office health checkpoints.
If not already in use, employee experience data will surely be of interest to HR and other workplace strategists. Culture Amp, Qualtrics, and Kudos are just a few of the many companies that address employee experience and engagement, in their own way. Here's a brief look at these three:
Culture Amp provides a host of capabilities designed to tackle issues such as employee retention, diversity, and digital transformation. Using a Culture Amp survey, for example, workplace strategists could assess employee attitudes on working from home and return to office.
With Qualtrics's Employee Experience Management (EXM) service, HR can send exit interview, training, onboarding, and employee pulse surveys. Meantime, IT can use its EmployeeXM for IT survey tool to gain insight into how employees are using technology and identify areas that it might want to address.
Kudos tackles the issue of employee experience slightly different. With the Kudos platform, employees can give each other recognition with badges, awards, and other means. And with reporting and analytic capabilities, HR can assess the level of engagement and how certain employees are performing.
Of course, any data is meaningless unless: 1) the right people have access to it, and 2) they know how to draw insights and take action from it. As one technology analyst recently told me, data is useless if it just sits in a software dashboard. And more fundamentally, workplaces need to embrace data from a cultural perspective.
So, as we look to a possible return to the office in 2021, now is the time to devise — or review — your data strategy.
