Use Cases of Employee Monitoring Software in OKR Strategy

[nenad_lazarevic]

 

OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a business management technique that revolves around setting broad, ambitious and success-driven objectives, as well as key results that are necessary measurable steps to achieving those goals. This sounds simple enough in theory, but in order for this strategy to actually work and lead to the further development of your business, you need to be able to set the right OKRs and then measure them in an accurate and consistent way.

 

Setting the objectives and key results is a matter of thinking about your business goals and deciding on which steps you should take to get there. On the other hand, measuring your efforts can be done using a variety of tools, one of which is employee monitoring software.

 

Since this system can track employees’ activities on their corporate computers, it offers you multiple solutions on how to monitor computer usage in order to measure your OKRs. Here are several broad categories of objectives that employee monitoring software can help you track, as well as some ways to apply it to measuring specific key results:

 

Efficiency Improvements

 

If your broad objective is to improve productivity and overall efficiency within your teams, then employee monitoring software can help you in tracking web application and software usage and analyzing how much time is spent on each task or activity. This is especially true if you are using PM/kanban tools such as trello or scrum software such as vivifyscrum, gitscrum or monitoring software for employees such as Hubstaff, Timedoctor, Activtrack or Workpuls etc.

 

A specific example of a key result in this category might be to decrease time on task X by Y percent. Task X can be anything, from creating invoices to writing social media copy, and, according to OKR principles, Y percent should be just above what you consider easily achievable. This is where monitoring software comes into play. 

 

It not only measures the time that your employees spend on specific tasks, but it also tracks how long they spend using specific programs and tools. This way, you can analyze time usage and figure out ways to make the activity more efficient. Measuring the effects is an easy process - the software keeps historical data, so you can compare that to your current performance and see how much of your goal you’ve managed to accomplish.

 

Billable to Non-Billable Hours Ratio

 

Getting this ratio to go as much in favor of billable hours as possible is directly correlated with the increase in profits. So focusing on this as a part of your OKR strategy could be a logical move for many companies.

 

Employee monitoring software can help you track the precise amount of billable and non-billable time fairly automatically. For instance, if one of your key results is to reach 5 hours of billable time per day for each employee, it’s very straightforward to put this into numbers if you know how to track computer usage time. Monitoring software will give you accurate measurements on the number of billable hours that employees won’t be able to manipulate.

 

Business Expansion

 

Chances are, one of your objectives is going to be to acquire more clients through taking on more projects in order to grow your business. Even though program and website tracking software can’t map out your growth, it can help you estimate your capacity for more projects.

 

This is one instance when this system can actually help you set OKRs. If you analyze each team’s performance on projects, you can come up with a strategy on where to save some more time and how much more workload your employees can realistically manage to handle. At the end, this might result in OKRs such as to take on two more projects every month.

 

Client Satisfaction

 

Even though this might seem like something employee monitoring software has nothing to do with, you’ll find that some of its features can go towards ensuring better relationships with clients.

 

More specifically, we’re referring to the ability to give your clients gated access to the monitoring data relevant to their own projects. This can improve your accountability and client satisfaction. Having this in mind, you might want to set a key result to provide monitoring data access to X clients, where X can be any number. Or you might even decide to aim for all of your current clients to have this access. Then, use this feature and record how many clients you’ve given the access to and maybe even get some feedback on whether it had the desired effect.

 

Conclusion

 

As OKR has proven to be a successful business strategy for many global companies, adopting it isn’t only a matter of what’s popular in the business world, but it can also help your company get direction, align everybody’s objectives and work towards growth and development. And in this pursuit, every little help from tools like employee monitoring software can prove invaluable.