Dynamics of Employee Activity: what is it and why is it important for the leader to monitor it

You already know that in response to different factors an employee can express varying degrees of activity and engagement. These factors can be anything – form the time of the day, the day of the week and the season to the level of motivation and the internal atmosphere in the team.

For example, according to data, most people are more active in the morning, and then decline in activity is observed closer to lunch and the end of the working day. Not surprising, employees tend to be less active after the holidays.

The relationships between the team members can also influence the drop of activity, as can the feeling of being undervalued, problems in the family or thoughts about changing the job.

If we're talking about a valuable employee who used to produce great results, then it is strategically important for the leader to promptly notice, analyze and understand the reasons for the decrease in activity.

How to measure the dynamics of employee activity?

The most effective method of analysis of the employee activity is, of course, constant monitoring of the team; the leader should stay on top of everything, feel the enthusiasm of the employees, see whose eyes light up when they are performing interesting tasks.

But unfortunately, especially when we're talking about big teams, not every leader has the time and willingness to notice every change of moods of their subordinates. Besides, keep in mind that people have different levels of empathy.
But in our technological age there is another method of tracking the employee activity. It can't really be called an alternative, seeing how it can be used as an effective addition to the first method we've written about above. We're talking about the program analysis of dynamics of employee activity that is implemented in our employee work hours monitoring system Kickidler in the working hours reports.

How does the Dynamics of Activity function in the Kickidler program work?

In the Reports menu of the employee monitoring software Kickidler you can create the report on dynamics of users activity. It will show exactly how active the employee was in certain intervals of time. You can analyze any interval of time, and you can choose to see it in intervals of hours or days.

Figure 1. Dynamics of engagement report in Kickidler software
 
How does the program record user's activity? That's simple: first, as indicated in the Figure 1, the program sorts all actions of the user into three groups – productive, neutral and unproductive, on the basis of the sites visited by the user and the applications they opened. For example, if the accountant opened the program 1C, it will be considered a productive action. But if the sales manager opened an online game, that will be considered an unproductive action.

Search engines will be marked in the chart in gray as neutral actions, the websites and programs without evaluation will be in yellow, which means they won't have any assessment.

But that's not the only thing. The same Figure 1 shows that all columns with an hour interval have different height. Why is that so? Because our program analyzes all activities of the user during the given hour and subtracts the time when the user wasn't doing anything. For example, if the employee didn't interact with the program or the website in any way for more than a minute, then the program will start recording it as inaction.

Such data can be obtained both on certain employees and on structural divisions as a whole. You can monitor even the company in general – the number of settings in our program gives room for improvisation.

Once again, Figure 1 shows the report on dynamics in the notional company, where employees are least active at 7 am, but they are only doing their jobs at that time period, no playing around. As lunch approaches, the employee activity grows, but the employees start to get distracted by unproductive websites and apps more often.

How can Dynamics of Employee Activity be useful?

Here leader's fantasy has no limits. For instance, you can identify the most unproductive period of time in your department and set up meetings during that time. You can also look and analyze whether the bonus you've given a certain employee has affected their level of motivation. Also our tool will allow you to understand which of your subordinates is the most motivated and which of them often gets distracted by external stimuli.

Having listed all these advantages, we must mention the shortcomings of our tool as well. For example, it won't record the time the employee spent on telephone negotiations with a client or got distracted with any other office work.

That's why we recommend using Dynamics of Employee Activity together with other tools of team management – reports, KPI, personnel assessment.

If you use this tool the correct way, it is capable of giving you comprehensive understanding of how your team is functioning.

Video: how the dynamics of employee activity was changing: