Random Activity Sampling
How To Know What Your Employees Do During Their Work Day
In today’s competitive world, understanding what your employees are doing is critically important in order to make process improvements and drive higher productivity. Although you may already have access to a number of performance indicators, such as number of orders taken, claims processed, customers served, customer satisfaction, etc., these don’t give you the detail or insight into how workers go about completing their tasks. They don’t offer visibility whether the correct processes are followed, or whether time is spent on the best mix of value added activities that drive productivity higher.
Getting Deeper Insights Into Your Employees’ Work Day
To understand how your workers spend their day, there are a number of methods that can provide the necessary insights, including surveys, external observer time studies or sampling studies, as well as self-administered time studies and sampling. There are cost benefit trade-offs between these methods, and each has its specific purpose. Please contact us if you’d like to discuss some of these in more detail.
The rest of this article will be focused on self-administered sampling, as the best and most cost-effective method to gain understanding of how your workers spend their day. This method is especially effective for large groups of workers, where any other observational method would be more time consuming and cost prohibitive.
“Random sampling is the most cost-effective way to gain insights into your employees’ work!”
With self-administered sampling, you instruct your employees to record information about the activity they are performing at some fixed-time or random-time intervals throughout the day. Typically, you select either an entire group, or a representative sub-group of employees to sample, define the expected activity list, choose a good sampling interval and length of the sampling project (a sampling project could run anywhere from 1 to 8 weeks of live data collection).
Using the Right Software Tool
Using our WorkStudy+ software suite, you can deploy this type of sampling study on your employees’ smartphones or PCs. At specific time intervals, WorkStudy+ prompts users to record the activity they are performing, along with any additional relevant information. The workers can make their selection from a list of pre-programmed activity choices, making the entire sampling interruption only a few seconds long. Users don’t have to worry about keeping track of when to record the next sample, the software takes care of that automatically. Additionally, all data is synced to a cloud portal, where study administrators get real-time visibility into participation and performance.
Deploying a sampling study with WorkStudy+ is extremely easy, even when sampling projects span large groups with workers spread over multiple geographic regions. The collected sampling data can be summarized using our powerful statistical reporting tools, and used to understand what employees spend their time doing, when they do it, and even to compare different sets of employees depending on their characteristics, such as tenure, location, task type or other attributes.
Our WorkStudy+ software suite has been used on many customer projects, ranging from insurance, banking, financial services, telecom, healthcare, food and beverage and other industries. You can successfully perform a sampling study in virtually any environment, and we offer a range of services to help make your project a success, including training, participation monitoring, reporting and statistical analysis of the collected data.
Would you like to see how easy it is to deploy a sampling study and how insightful the results can be?
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