In a lot of industries it’s very easy to monitor how individuals are performing, you just have to check how many items they produce, how many items they sell or the quality of the items they produce. When it comes to monitoring how a business as a whole is performing, the immediate thought goes to the bank account and how much money it’s making. It’s easy to see why, it’s the conception of the term “how the business is performing”, but what about each individual member of the workforce and how they’re contributing to the business?

This is much more difficult to monitor, and would usually involve collating all of the data from each employee, checking their attendance, productivity, quality and then their commitment to what they’re working on. When running a business, or even just a department or team within the business, you don’t have the time to be doing this and it’s often not a fair representation anyway. Fortunately workforce analytics are available to help you keep a close eye on performance so you can monitor the true state of the business, whether standards are improving, plateauing or dropping.

There are two important pieces of software that are becoming increasingly important to managers, at all levels of the business. Reporting is an important part of any business, gathering all of the information and relevant data based on the work over a certain period of time, whether that’s a month, quarterly or even weekly, and having access to software that can help to create both current and historic data into an easy-to-digest report can only help to provide the best possible report for all parties – the business, the client or customer, and those working on the project – so that improvements in performance or process can be made where necessary.

Another increasingly valuable asset is insight, providing the ability to monitor and make detailed evaluations about performance. Insights provide statistical and visual data as to how a campaign is progressing, making it much more evident where things are going well and where there is room for improvement – and most importantly why things aren’t going so well – and makes for a great tool for reporting back to customers or clients or analyzing performance when it comes to contract renewals and training suggestions.

When it comes to performance, you want to know immediately when things start to take a turn for the worse, and you want to know the exact reasons. Having access to workforce analytics, therefore, is just as important as having financial business success because if your workforce is not performing or the processes in place aren’t working; that financial success may start to take a sudden U-turn and you’ll have no idea why.