Analyzing Employee Productivity

You can tell a lot from server logs. For example, many firms now analyze web access logs to see if employees are spending too much personal time on the web. Analyzing raw logs isn't fun; it can help considerably to run them through some sort of program that can digest the data and present it in a more usable form. Increasingly, HTML pages are the format of choice because of the ability to "drill down" for more detail when you want to. I recently did an extended version of the project described at http://www.aplawrence.com/Unix/squidlog.html, but with more bells and whistles, such as the ability to group by department.

Most of the projects I describe in these pages are limited versions of things I do for clients. I don't usually include all the features that I may have in the "real" project, and often the code supplied is designed to be more illustrative than functional. If you have needs for more complex versions of something you have seen here, please do request an estimate. Many projects are quite inexpensive.

Being able to call up a web page that shows that your HR department made 1,500 web page accesses on Tuesday might be all you'd need to know if that department consists of 350 people. If it were 5 people, that 1,500 figure might seem a little excessive, so you would drill into it, either to break it down by individual machine or by sites accessed. You might find that most of the access came from your HR manager scouring the web looking for new personnel software, and no doubt that would be acceptable use. On the other hand, you might find that the $275.00 per hour consultant you have in this week seems to have an extreme interest in sports and gambling related sites. That wouldn't be such a happy find, and might cause you to block access to such sites (easily done with the Mitel SME Server by the way). That would be shortly after your chat with the consultant, of course.

Seriously, most employees don't abuse web access any more than they abuse the telephone or water cooler breaks. However, there are sometimes very noticeable exceptions, and without analysis like this, web abuse can be much harder to notice. Instant Messaging, and email use can also be logged, analyzed and (if necessary) restricted, filtered, or blocked outright. In many organizations, the logging is already being done; the data just needs to be collected into a convenient form (such as web pages) to allow "at a glance" analysis. Careful attention needs to be paid to the design of such presentations: a web page that goes unused is just a waste of time. On the other hand, some companies have made at least some of this available to all employees, on the theory that self-policing and peer pressure work better than the heavy hand of management.

More clues to productivity

There is more that can be analyzed. Both NT and Unix have server performance analysis tools. Analysis of this data can reveal much about employees use of the servers, which in turn translates into actual work done if most of their job would require server resources. Because I am often involved with performance issues, I've looked at many systems from this perspective. At just about every company where I have done this, the pattern is the same: employees check in at 9:00 AM (or whenever the shift starts), but the server logs will show that very little actual work is done before 10:00 AM. You might argue that people are checking email the first half hour or so, but I observed this pattern long before most companies had email. Nowadays, I bet real work might even begin a little later because of AM email reading. By the way, there's much more to this than just looking at cpu activity: for example, you can tell when programs first start up by looking at filesystem directory cache usage, and disk drive data transfer stats show searching and printing activity quite plainly. From these tools, you will usually see that work drops off again before lunch, and doesn't pick up again till well after. Typically there's then a burst of very heavy activity until 4:00 or 4:30 PM. This pattern is so typical that I'm quite surprised if I don't find it at any reasonably sized company. It's led me to think that everyone would be better off if we just had four hour workdays..

Well, that's probably not going to happen. Most managers realize that their employees aren't going to be working at high intensity all day long, and in today's busy world, some level of personal activity is acceptable and sometimes quite necessary. Few companies really need to restrict or deny personal use entirely, but knowing what the level of non-business use actually is, and when individuals or groups exceed the norm is what it important. Analysis of logs and server performance is the way to determine that, and intelligent presentation of data is the smart way to do it.

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