How Governments Save Taxpayer Money by Being More Efficient
A guide to operational efficiency in government agencies.
For government organizations, deciding how to best use taxpayer money is a central priority.
With millions of eyes on every move they make and a vested interest in how the public’s hard-earned money is spent, there is a great deal of pressure to improve processes and operational efficiency.
But how can governments use work tracking tools to boost efficiency?
What the Data Reveals About Government Efficiency
To determine whether there is a true correlation between improved efficiency and saving taxpayer money, let’s take a look at some of the numbers from the Government Accountability Office (GOA) 2022 report:
- Since the GOA started annual reports 12 years ago, the US government has gained $552 billion as a result of savings and increased revenue from suggested actions.
- The IRS could save more than $20 million through better management of refund payments and improved services.
- The Department of Health and Human Services saved $140 billion by changing processes.
All this is to say: by taking actions designed for employee performance optimization, government agencies can save huge sums of taxpayer money.
With that in mind, let’s turn our attention to the use of work from home monitoring tools and how they could potentially be used to increase taxpayer savings.
How Workforce Analytics Supports Operational Efficiency
Insightful, the best employee monitor software for privacy, can provide government agencies with the tools needed to empower teams and employees and encourage optimal performance. When you know how employees spend their time, and establish metrics to measure team performance, you can take action to create more efficient workflows.
Here are some of the main computer surveillance features you can leverage to optimize operational efficiency:
Individual and Team Efficiency
Knowing how productive your workforce is by monitoring employee internet usage will only help if you can pinpoint what that means on a granular level.
By monitoring performance in the workplace, do you know which teams and individuals are top performers and are spending their time wisely?
On the other hand, do you know which teams and individuals may be underperforming or spending more time idle?
With a tool like Insightful, you can monitor employees computer activity and answer these questions with a glance at the real-time data reports.
Here’s how:
- Automatically track time - gauge daily, weekly, and monthly output as a result of hours spent engaged in work-related activities.
- Identify key productivity trends - Evaluate productivity on a timeline and measure it against expectations so you can see what factors may be influencing employee and team-based productivity.
- Track app usage - Analyze how much employees and teams rely on certain apps, and whether this has a significant impact on overall output or whether some are unproductive time sinks.
Benchmarks for Productivity
There are two factors that determine how well a company is performing: efficiency and productivity.
Efficiency - Using the least resources to get work done
Productivity - A metric which indicates overall output
While efficiency is all about how you can cut corners and refine processes to save time and resources, productivity is about how much you can accomplish in a day.
By establishing benchmarks for productivity, you can challenge your teams and employees to hit tangible goals regarding output. Be it the amount of blog posts written, goals set, or cases reviewed, having productivity benchmarks can set the standard in your government agency.
When you use a tool like Insightful, you can increase the positive impact of these benchmarks through data transparency. As Forbes top employee monitoring tool for privacy, Insightful is an excellent option for sharing data with employees and yielding the following benefits:
- Accountability - Granting employees access to their time data breeds greater accountability as they become aware of their input and performance.
- Motivation - Motivation can be hard to come by when you have no indicators of how well you’re doing, and whether your actions are leading to positive results. With Insightful you can overcome this hurdle and encourage employees to derive motivation in improving their productivity.
- Integration - When employees can see how they’re performing, and you have that level of transparency, it can create trust by letting them know that their performance and growth within the company is in their hands.
With productivity benchmarks you can also identify outliers and top performers, which can help you single out employees for career growth opportunities or performance appraisals.
Optimized Workflows
If you want to increase workplace efficiency, individual and team workflows are great areas to focus on.
How your employees work is just as important as what they work on and how much they work.
Here are some of the ways you can audit and optimize workflows in your agency:
- Identify skill gaps - Skill gaps can throw teams off course and let you know where you need to focus your training resources or hiring strategy. If you find that certain projects take longer for some teams, then you can proactively seek ways to bridge the skill gaps and speed up workflows.
- Track app usage - By tracking app and website usage with Insightful, you’re able to see which tools are essential for effective workflows and which result in more work about work than meaningful progress.
- Build individual awareness - When you share data with your employees, you can create a sense of individual awareness. This level of transparency allows employees to find ways of optimizing their own workflows for a more seamless experience.
How to Bring it All Together
While every suggestion in this guide can be implemented separately to see what impact it has on efficiency and productivity, sometimes a holistic approach is the best way forward.
By implementing monitoring software for employees, for example, a workforce analytics platform like Insightful - you can bring all of these tools and systems together in one place.
You can monitor productivity and efficiency, set benchmarks, and identify key trends. By sifting through the data in real-time and using monthly reports, it becomes easier to be proactive and identify what each team and individual needs before issues arise that lead to lost productivity.
Using software like Insightful is a reliable way to keep track of everything that makes your agency tick and make efficiency-enhancing adjustments as you go.