How Can Businesses Use Collaboration Analytics?
When businesses leverage collaboration analytics to assess workforce habits, optimization follows. One application should ensure prioritizing employees’ well-being. “Organizations should be collecting telemetry to actually make sure that people have a decent experience,” McKeon-White says. AI can track instant messages for keywords that indicate low morale levels or job satisfaction, as well as potential signs of burnout, giving enterprises the opportunity to step in and help.
On the other hand, messages from an organization’s most successful teams can be analyzed to better identify how they communicate and collaborate, so their methods can be replicated across a company. For example, Google Work Insights could reveal that individuals on a company’s best team collaborate equally (i.e., no silent or inactive participants) in Google Docs in terms of time spent and number of edits made. This can avoid scenarios where, according to a Harvard Business Review study, up to 35 percent of the most fruitful collaborative efforts come from only 3 to 5 percent of employees.
Insights might illuminate that successful teams have a high percentage of interactions with other departments on projects. With those key metrics identified, an organization can then encourage all departments to adopt those practices — and track their progress in doing so.
Another application of collaboration analytics can lead to insights about video meetings. Tracking their length, frequency and participants can help companies make meetings more efficient — shifting 30-minute check-ins to email where appropriate, or curbing time spent on tangential topics. Organizations might also aim to reduce the number of large-group meetings where many participants don’t contribute because too many people makes speaking up a challenge.
Some tools, like those that Zoom provides, can even monitor the stability of a worker’s bandwidth, allowing companies to ensure videos aren’t sabotaged by poor connectivity.
“They then can help employees optimize those connections,” McKeon-White says. “That way, one person with the faulty connection on the line doesn’t constantly feel like they have to troubleshoot instead of collaborating.”
Despite these benefits, companies should be wary of some hurdles of using analytics.
Click the banner below to receive exclusive content on collaboration when you register as an Insider.