EP021 - Using people analytics to create more productive teams with Anita Zbieg of Network Perspective
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Using people analytics to create more productive teams with Anita Zbieg of Network Perspective
About the episode
This episode focuses on people analytics and the importance of metrics for better team operations. Why do we need to use people analytics to boost team engagement? How to use data to create better team operations? Why providing a visual data dashboard for managers can help with better team management? I discuss the topic with Anita Zbieg, founder of Network Perspective.
About the guest
Anita Zbieg - expert with over 10 years of experience in Work & People Analytics. Network, collaboration, and communication analyst. She’s done PhD in economics and psychology, applying ONA (Organizational Network Analysis) in organizational design. Over a dozen scientific papers on network analysis. She's built her experience into Network Perspective - an analytical software giving teams & leaders data with insights about teams’ collaboration habits.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
Quotes from the show
Remote companies search for more data & tools that can visualize how the work and collaboration is done. Few years ago task management tools did it for projects, or OKRs for goals, but there are still a lot of hidden areas of how we work, for example collaboration. If we have this visualized, we just synchronize better, and we don't need to ask others about many things. It is hard to see what is happening remotely on the scale of a team, business function, or company-wide outside of our own work. It is why employees and managers have different views on productivity. Tools that visualize remote work and collaboration can help in reducing this bias.
We see in the data that teams are working with many other teams, but a lot of the collaboration can be simplified just by contracting communications rules. On the other hand, collaboration might not happen because people don't have time, it is uncomfortable, or it does not have the right priority. The trick is to understand better how we collaborate and how we can manage and improve it.
Synchronous collaboration through meetings is great, and it's needed in a remote environment, but there are some thresholds. We found such a threshold at a minimum of 5 hours per week to be bonded to the team and sync the tasks. We also found that the maximum of this threshold is around 15 hours per week per employee, which results in three meetings 1 hour long, or six meetings 0,5 hour long per day. That is where the meetings may start to be contra-productive for the individuals and the team: as we don’t have time to prepare and take next steps. Also too many meetings are overwhelming employees with screen time causing zoom fatigue and tiredness, worry or burnout associated with the overuse of virtual videoconferencing.