New WFH Employee Productivity Tools Emerge, Sapience Vue Latest Entrant

Sapience have launchedOpens a new window their SaaS-based analytics tool for remote work employee productivity and compliance. Called Sapience Vue, it collects, analyses and provides insights into employee work engagement, and device and application use. Sapience Vue has been developed and released for enterprises looking to mainstream remote-work as a business operating strategy. Tools in this category aim to help management optimize telecommuting, instill accountability, maintain organizational compliances and monitor work activities.

The need for the solution arises from the need to maintain a remote workforce for a prolonged period of time due to COVID-19. Even as the world economies open up gradually, a survey revealed that nearly 64% of employeesOpens a new window are reluctant to return to their offices. It is safe to assume that remote work is here to stay, at least for a majority of the workforce.

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Sapience Vue is developed to enable enterprises address the operational, technological and work-behavioral changes associated with the shift to remote work environments. The tool extrapolates endpoint device and application data and churns out insights driven by machine learning. This includes providing visibility to managers into how a change in work environment affects employee work patterns, their performance and productivity. Data is collected from endpoint devices like desktops, mobiles, laptops; and enterprise applications through APIs in real-time.

Of course, when it comes to tools like this, the question of privacy and surveillance cant be far behind. Sapience maintains that Vue does not breach employee privacy protocols as it does not implement intrusive surveillance tactics such as screen scraping, keystroke capture, personally identifiable information (PII) sharing, or location tracking.

Sapience’s Azure-hosted SaaS solution for performance, process, human capital measurement and optimization does not, however, address all the cons of remote work environments. The flipside of employee experience in working remotely in times of distress such as the ongoing pandemic, which includes emotional and moral support, remain indistinct from the metrics and data-driven solution.

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“With COVID, we have reached a tipping point of when Work from Home meets Big Data. For the first time, organizations have work activity digitized to the extent never seen previously. There is a tremendous opportunity to harness this work activity data, discover trends and patterns, and leverage these insights to optimize people, processes and application utilization, for maximum efficiency and competitive advantage,” said Brad Killinger, CEO of Sapience Analytics while speaking exclusively with Toolbox.

“Sapience Vue leverages our rich heritage and expertise in helping companies move to a Work from Home model over the past decade with the latest in analytics, business intelligence and machine learning technologies. The result is a platform that is non invasive and which provides unprecedented visibility into their greatest investment – the workforce.”

Sridhar Iyengar, MD at Zoho Europe explainsOpens a new window , “Managing remote employees comes with its own set of challenges, such as the problem of overworking, a lack of technology, human interaction, and communication. Especially for those who have not previously experienced home-working, it is essential to develop new work from home policies that keep employees focused and engaged, whilst maintaining a positive mindset.”

Other more tactical and project based productivity tracking tools in this emerging space include TimeDoctor, Basecamp and Trust, and the more enterprise scale tools include Kronos Workforce Central and Workday HCM, which are extending their HCM solutions to also serve the performance analytics needs of remote and distributed teams.It will be interesting to see how the space evolves in the months ahead.

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