What is at the core of your business? It could be physical infrastructure, you might say it’s proprietary technology. But, in this day and age, there’s a good chance it’s people. Companies used to produce widgets but for some time now, they’ve been producing ideas.

Google is a prime example of a company driven by intellectual capital. As of 2010, Google employed 20,621 people in dozens of countries across the globe. Employees are the core of the business: they development platforms, monetize them, market them, monitor billing and ensure compliance with relevant legislation. What is Google if not its employees?

Companies like Google, driven by knowledge workers rather than traditional means of production, face a host of challenges that widget-makers never experienced. One of those challenges is management, at a very basic level. As the saying goes, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. How do you measure a human being?

Consider this hypothetical. Company A has 30 employees working on 3 projects in addition ongoing tasks. The first is of utmost importance, because could lead to account. The second is non-urgent development work for an existing client. The third is a rebuild of the company’s website, another low-priority item. Management eventually assesses that the team is falling behind on the first urgent project and requests that developers do costly overtime in order to meet the deadline. The company risks losing the major new account and ends up losing money on the development project because the cost of the overtime.

Meanwhile, 42% of the company’s employee hours over the past few weeks have been dedicated to the non-urgent second project and 27% to the non-urgent website rebuild. Information that management didn’t have access to at the time. If they had known how the employee hours were trending during such a crucial time, they would surely have made different decisions. But despite reports from project managers and team leaders, Company A’s decision-makers didn’t have clear visibility into the distribution of its most essential resources: people.

The business community is only beginning to realize the necessity of workforce analytics (a term that still means different things to different people). What does it mean to Telax? Our vision of workforce analytics is, at its core, one of data aggregation. Earlier, we asked the question, “How do you measure a human being?” For the purposes of workforce analytics, the answer is: you break down a person’s working time into chunks of data than you can then manipulate, aggregate and dashboard. As for the technology that makes such a breakdown possible, we’ve got you covered.

It’s important to remember that workforce analytics is not some Orwellian attempt at implementing absolute employee surveillance. On the contrary, it is an approach to management that should ultimately reduce employee frustration, workplace friction and increase efficiency. The data generated by this type of technology isn’t useful on an individual level, but on a collective one.

Traditionally, people are measured on results or output. But for proactive management, you need to be ahead of the curve. Your employee may be doing a great job at rebuilding a website, but they are not being effective in meeting the company’s goals if they should be working something else. Peter Drucker, in his book The Effective Executive, states that “there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Had Company A from our hypothetical been working with a workforce analytics solution, it could have avoided costly mistakes in resource distribution. Is your business vulnerable to the same error? Get in touch with us to learn more.