Data Visualization for Work from Home (WFH)

As remote work becomes common, organizations need to empower their remote workers with the right tools to deliver in the new normal.

What started as a temporary solution is gaining momentum as businesses move out of lockdowns. Remote work helped leaders and their employees ensure business continuity during the COVID 19 crisis and is still proving to be a strong consideration.

However, there are concerns around stability, productivity, and sustained interest that will get more acute as we move forward.

Side-effects of Work From Home trends

About 72% of organizations seem to believe that the impact of the pandemic will be felt beyond six months (E&Y survey). This survey revealed the worries of leaders: some 70% put a fall in productivity as the single biggest concern for continued remote working. A researcher from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) observed that the share of working days spent at home can rise fourfold from pre-COVID levels, from 5% to 20%. But there is a catch. There were only some segments like managers, professionals, and financial workers (51% of the survey respondents) who work from home at an efficiency rate of 80% or more.

Now consider this. As per a recent report from ‘Your Amigos Foundation’ on the physical, social, psychological, and financial effects of work-from-home on 165 working professionals of different age groups across India: 54% have noted a serious dip in their ‘me time’.

Why should these two issues even coexist in today’s technology-empowered era? If only employees had the right tools that allowed them to work smarter, faster, and with enhanced collaboration; then both productivity and me-time can be achieved. No one has to compromise– neither the employer nor the employee.

Crack the source – Data

The gaps and concerns exist because employees can suffer work-information clutter and work overload in an environment where water cooler chats and face-to-face discussions are not possible. A lot of time can get spent in filtering useful information from the pile of data that a user gets on the screen. The hours spent in getting clarity, brevity and actionable insights from a massive set of documents can be exhausting.

It is critical that enterprises look at data visualization from a fresh perspective. This is more than a technology. It allows overwhelmed employees to save time and effort by translating unstructured and structured data into a visual format. When data is easily digestible and comprehensible, it immediately becomes actionable.

The benefits of data visualization go beyond data processing. The ability to visualize information neatly makes it easy for people to act on it, to collaborate with it and to innovate on it.

Also Read: What is Data Visualization and why it matters?

When they see data in the form of visual elements like charts, dashboards, gamification and maps; they can make better sense of it quickly. This also helps to make the data more engaging and insightful. They can see patterns, unlock business insights and get to build on the data with creative decisions.

The future lies in visualization. In a recent report from ResearchAndMarkets, the global data visualization market will show a positive market trend due to an increase in demand for cloud technology in data visualization and for quick decision making. In the Asia-Pacific region, in particular, growing internet usage, smartphone penetration, the rapid rate of urbanization, development in ML, and the need for the customer and behavioral analytics will drive this growth. With enhanced IoT adoption and increased data generation in new areas like smart factories, people will need all the visualization tools that they can equip themselves with.

The first step would be to choose the right solution like PowerBI, that provides non-technical business users with tools for aggregating, analyzing, visualizing and sharing data. Similarly, Tableau makes it easy to visualize massive sets of data. In a short time, you can create custom visualization using drag and drop interfaces and recognize patterns and stories within the data.

The question is not whether your industry will embrace data visualization. The question is how soon and how well you use these solutions to change a remote worker into an empowered, productive, and confident worker. So that both the sides stay happy and ready for the next curve.