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How to Reveal Productive Hours in a Workday

When thinking about the ways to improve the productivity of your staff, you might miss a less obvious aspect affecting their ability to work with total efficiency — time of day. Circadian rhythms are proven to influence our attitudes in multiple ways. They elevate our moods early in the morning and on weekends and improve our logical reasoning from 08.00 to 14.00. They are powerful enough to govern people of different professions and invisibly interfere with various business activities. For example, health care providers are more prone to succeed in establishing diagnoses and performing surgeries in the mornings. A report by Harvard Business Review shows that circadian rhythms can even decrease stock returns by 1.5% over a year if earnings calls are scheduled in the late afternoon.

Why Spotting Productive Hours Is Important

So, everyone is subject to diurnal variation, and following the above statistics, it may seem that morning hours work best for a productivity boost. But it’s not that simple, as there is no one-size-fits-all circadian pattern. Lark and owl chronotypes are recognized scientifically, as well as it is admitted that the standard 9 a.m.-5 p.m. schedule is better suited for early birds or those who fall in between than for owls. The latter type is less productive in the first half of the day and also more prone to depression. Moreover, if morning and evening people are forced to follow ill-suited schedules, they face the risk of developing a whole array of mental and physical disorders, up to cancer. These findings should make you think about all kinds of losses associated with sick leaves and staff turnover in addition to the productivity challenge.

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Yet, it’s not the whole story. It seems that the traditional eight-hour workday scheme doesn’t work anymore. A study conducted among nearly 2,000 UK office workers revealed that an average employee stays focused on work-related tasks for only three hours a day. Both massive digitalization and the recent pandemic have added uncertainty to the efficiency of fixed full-time work schedules. Remote teams, hybrid workplaces, and flexible hours are the new normal now, offering higher sustainability while delivering increased productivity. Statistics gathered by one US-based recruitment agency prove that remote workers’ productivity skyrocketed by up to 47% during the 2020 lockdown.

This evidence should inspire employers to adjust their approach to working hours by providing their staff with the freedom to fulfill duties when the employees feel engaged and productive. However, a total absence of supervision may lead to abusing your trust, not to mention that your workers may need some assistance in spotting what works best for them. And you do have the power to find those perfect productive hours in a workday — with the Controlio employee monitoring software by Work Examiner.

How to Track Productivity with the Help of Controlio

Productivity-targeted features of Controlio allow you to observe how active each of your employees is day by day and hour by hour. For you to grasp the information easily, it is displayed in an intuitive graphical form, clearly revealing individual productivity patterns.

As is always the case with Work Examiner’s products, each feature comes with customizable settings to give you more flexibility and ensure higher data accuracy.

While you can track and compare an employee’s productivity hours across various timeframes, you are also provided with reports on activity types. They help you understand how the worker divides his or her labor hours between various tasks as well as between work and breaks. These insights go beyond people, showing you what digital tools your staff uses and how this correlates with efficiency in the workplace.

Mind that you are free to adjust settings to correspond to different roles assigned to your employees and teams. If a marketing department is responsible for monitoring prices across Amazon pages, you can set up an appropriate productivity level in a few clicks. Thus, you will get a true picture of productivity gaps to fix and achievements to promote for each staff member or business unit.

Surely, you would want to get a broader perspective on the issue, and Controlio delivers this opportunity by default. You can compare various productivity metrics across teams and users, aligning them with different time zones if required. The software automatically generates prompts by showing you how the metrics change compared with previous periods.

Having these helpful data at hand, managers will be able to discover the most productive hours in a workday for each employee and implement corresponding improvements into schedules. Further, they can increase the overall performance by eliminating distractions, which is also possible thanks to the Work Examiner tools.

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