A new application has entered the arena of digital productivity tracking: WorkStats.dev
WorkStats describes itself as “a dashboard tool to quantify your productivity by visualizing numbers from services such as GitHub, Jira, Asana, Google, and Slack.”
With a simple and clear UI, WorkStats gives you and your team members the raw numbers of your productivity across a growing suite of project management and DevOps applications, such as the number of lines of code added in GitHub, tasks opened and closed in Asana, and messages sent in Slack.
According to founder Hiroshi Nishio via the WorkStats Twitter account, many new features are in the pipeline, including integrations with additional platforms such as Trello and Microsoft Teams.
WorkStats claims its app contributes to workplace success in three key areas: project assessment, 1 on 1 team member meetings, and mid-year employee evaluations. The self-described advantage of WorkStats is that it provides quantitative data to supplement qualitative assessments of efficiency and efficacy.
Additionally, WorkStats offers its data to employers and employees alike. Stats are presented in a simple dashboard where a team member can view their own numbers and how they compare to others on their team, on other teams in the company, and even others in comparable industries.
Recent analyses of remote workplaces have pointed to the success of quantitative productivity metrics, especially when it comes to fostering trust in management and keeping morale up for employees.
Other team analysis software that, for example, tracks an employee’s app usage or website history dances dangerously close to violating employees’ rights to privacy. This not only damages the relationships among team members and senior leadership, but it puts employers in a precarious position of navigating the legality of their project and team management strategies.
One additional advantage of a tool like WorkStats is the role data can play in overcoming and interrupting workplace biases and inequality.
Research has shown that when asked to self-evaluate their performance on work-related tasks, women consistently under-rate themselves. The gender gap in self-evaluation remains true even when women are given absolute, quantitative data representing their performance (e.g. being given their numerical score on a test).
So, clearly, giving employees the raw stats on their productivity rates and those of their peers is not a silver bullet to interrupt the self-evaluation gender gap. However, an app like WorkStats gives you, as an employer, the opportunity to interrupt the cycle if you see it happening.
And when it comes to pinpointing employees for promotions, bonuses, or accolades, WorkStats gives you some of the tools you need to reward and elevate true employee excellence, not simply Kevin’s audacity to rate himself 33% higher than Carol, whose stats are numerically identical.
While still in the early stages of deployment, WorkStats offers useful analytics to employers and employees alike with its non-intrusive data collection and easy-to-interpret interface. For those looking to bring data to the table in project triage and performance evaluation, WorkStats seems worth a try.
