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How WFH Has Reshaped Our Work Behaviors: A Data Deep Dive

Shaun Chaudhary

July 6, 2020

7 minute read

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

We are now 100+ days since COVID-19 caused nationwide lockdowns. Since being thrust into remote work, the main question on people’s minds has been: “How will this change work moving forward?”

At BetterCloud—like most companies—we migrated to fully remote work in March 2020, but unlike a lot of companies, we have guaranteed work from home until at least February 1, 2021. This has been a major shift for us. While our company did not prohibit working remotely, we were founded on a strong in-office culture that our CEO David Politis consistently touted.

Given this drastic change, the analytics team at BetterCloud was curious how COVID-19 ripple effects have altered BetterCloud, through the lens of the data we ingest. We have anecdotally heard that our customers have been dealing with the same changes, so we feel confident this analysis is indicative of a broader trend in the workplace. We have broken up the effects into a few sections:

  • How have BetterClouders’ workstyles changed?
  • How have our customers’ behaviors in the product changed?
  • How have our interactions with prospects and customers changed?

How has your workplace changed since COVID-19? We’ll be discussing this topic in the BetterIT Slack community, home to 4,000+ IT professionals. Sign up and join the convo!

Below are some of the major conclusions from our analysis:

  • Large meetings are a thing of the past. When working remotely, small targeted meetings are key to productivity. [Jump to section]
  • Remote tools like Slack, Zoom, and Google Meet are being used to their full potential. [Jump to section]
  • Without lengthy commutes, people are starting and ending their work days earlier; IT/support teams should plan their hours accordingly. [Jump to section]
  • Without the ability to stop by a co-worker’s desk to ask a quick question, employees want self-serve analytics. [Jump to section]

  • Given the shift to remote work, people are craving a sense of community to connect with others. This is manifesting through an increase in public channel creation in Slack and the influx in growth of BetterIT. [Jump to section]

How have BetterClouders’ workstyles changed?

Meeting size and frequency are decreasing

Google Calendar meeting data Google Calendar meeting data

 

 

 

We analyzed Google Calendar data from the G Suite Admin console and discovered the following: Overall meetings are decreasing, and the number of attendees per meeting is also decreasing.

The blue bars in the chart are the number of meetings for Monday to Friday each week, and we have gone from front-loading meetings on Mondays and Tuesdays to a more even distribution of meetings, albeit at depressed levels.

The orange line is the recipient count for the calendar invites, and we witness a strong downward trend.

Intuitively this makes sense; the productivity of a virtual meeting scales inversely with the number of active attendees. As we have moved to fully remote work, it is more difficult to have roundtable meetings via Zoom or Google Meet.

Increase in Slack usage, especially in the number of files uploaded

A bar chart illustrates the growth in two metrics—files uploaded and public channels—in a single workspace from FY 2020 Q2 to FY 2021 Q1. The chart features two distinct bars for each fiscal quarter, representing the number of files uploaded and public channels. Both metrics show a noticeable upward trend over time, indicating increased user engagement and activity within the workspace across these quarters.

Unsurprisingly, we have seen a dramatic increase in Slack usage since we started working remotely. Specifically, Slack is being used as a more complete collaboration tool versus just quick messaging.

From FY 2020 Q4 to FY 2021 Q1, we saw a 61% increase in the number of files uploaded in Slack.

We imagine that this is similar for companies across the country. With the increase in files uploaded, there is an increase in the risk of employees sharing sensitive information over Slack. BetterCloud’s Targeted Content Scanning feature, which allows you to scan files for sensitive information across apps like Google, Slack, O365, Box, and Dropbox, can help mitigate this type of risk.

Additionally, public channel creation increased as employees sought more ways to connect with each other virtually. In fact, our IT team encouraged this to keep BetterClouders engaged and connected.

Google Meet and Zoom usage have skyrocketed

A color legend featuring two labeled squares: a blue square represents "Google," and an orange square stands for "Zoom." The visual is likely used to clarify the color-coding in a related chart, graph, or diagram. A bar chart compares the usage of Google and Zoom meetings from November 2019 to April 2020. The bars representing Google usage are blue, while those for Zoom are orange. Both services show a marked increase in usage over time, with a significant surge observed in March and April 2020. The chart highlights monthly data points for each service, illustrating their growth trajectory during this period.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Work from home inevitably led to a rise in Google Meet and Zoom usage. We collectively spent 533K minutes on Zoom in April 2020 and saw a 220% increase in the number of Zoom participants from February 2020 to March 2020.

At the beginning of work from home, BetterCloud upgraded its Zoom SKU, but the data shows people still defaulted to using Google Meet the majority of the time (we are a pretty dedicated G Suite shop). Anecdotally we’ve heard from our employees that folks like Google Meet for 1:1s and Zoom for group and external meetings.

Strong increase in Tableau usage as people become more self-sufficient

Line graph illustrating a notable increase in Tableau server hits from January 2020 to May 2020. The x-axis represents the months from January to May, while the y-axis shows the number of server hits. The line starts at a lower point in January and ascends steadily, reaching its peak in May, indicating consistent growth over this period. Datos label highlights key milestones or data points along the progression curve.

Line chart titled "Tableau Unique Users" displays a consistent upward trend from January 2020 to April 2020, with user numbers peaking in April. Beginning in May 2020, there is a noticeable but slight decline in unique users. The x-axis represents time in months from January to May 2020, while the y-axis quantifies the number of unique users.

One of the major goals of the Data & Analytics team, when it was founded in 2016, was to “democratize data at BetterCloud.” We started a long journey of extracting data from all the applications we use into a centralized database, and then layering Tableau dashboards on top to allow employees in different verticals to fish for themselves.

Tableau usage data indicates a strong upward trend in usage, but remote work has accelerated the trend. Our thought is that people are now unable to tap their neighbor on their shoulder to ask questions, and instead would have to message them and wait for a response. People will try to be self-sufficient and solve problems on their own. To that end, we saw a 67% increase in the number of monthly users from January to April 2020.

How have our customers’ behaviors in the product changed?

More complex automated workflows in BetterCloud—with more actions

Bar chart titled "Workflow Actions" depicting monthly data from January 2020 to May 2020. Five vertical bars represent each month, progressively increasing in height from January (shortest) to May (tallest), indicating a rising trend in workflow actions over the period. The y-axis measures the number of actions, while the x-axis lists the months by their written abbreviations.

BetterCloud gives you unparalleled ability to build deep, complex, automated workflows to manage your users and data. Given the uniform transition to remote work for our customers, we analyzed how our product usage was impacted.

As we expected, workflow usage increased in the months following COVID-19.

Interestingly, we saw an outsized increase in the number of actions customers were executing compared to the number of overall workflows being executed. This indicates customers were running more complex workflows with more actions.

From BetterCloud’s perspective, this is an amazing outcome. More actions being run leads to more time being saved by IT admins and more value derived from BetterCloud!

A 53% increase in offboarding usage

A bar chart illustrating the number of users offboarded across various integrations from January to June 2020. Bars for March and April peak prominently, indicating the highest offboarding counts during these months. Subsequent months, May and June, show a significant decrease in user offboarding numbers, while January and February have relatively lower but steady figures compared to the peak months. The chart visually emphasizes the dramatic rise and subsequent fall in user offboarding activity within the given time frame.

One of the most popular use cases of BetterCloud workflows is user lifecycle management. One of the data points we were most interested in was offboarding usage once the economic impacts of COVID-19 became an unfortunate reality.

What we saw aligned with the broader economy; offboarding usage increased 53% in March 2020 compared to February 2020.

This outpaced normal cyclical offboarding and aligns anecdotally with many of the layoffs our customers experienced.

To that end, we found our customers leveraging our vast library of actions to offboard users in Google, Zoom, Okta, OneLogin, Slack, Box, Zendesk and many other apps.

How have our interactions with prospects & customers changed?

A new 8-4 workday

A chart displaying sales representative connections from January 1 to March 9, 2020, segmented by time of day and weekday. Color-coded blocks illustrate the frequency of connections, with darker shades indicating higher frequency. The vertical axis lists days of the week from Monday to Sunday, and the horizontal axis represents hourly intervals throughout each day. Peaks in activity are visible during late morning and early afternoon hours on weekdays, while weekends show a significant drop in connection frequency.

Timetable displaying sales representative connections from March 9 to June 29, 2020. The chart uses a color-coded system to indicate different activity levels, with distinct colors representing low, moderate, and high engagement. Connections are mapped across a grid of days Monday through Friday and various times of the day. The timetable reveals patterns in peak activity periods and quieter times, helping to identify trends in sales rep interactions during the specified date range.

The BetterCloud sales team routinely analyzes sales connection patterns to understand trends and areas for improvement. We took a look to see if there were any changes in connection patterns pre- and post-COVID-19 and found that connection trends shifted one hour earlier in the day compared to before work from home.

Specifically, looking at the “before 9 AM” and “after 5 PM” slots before and after fully remote working, we found that prior to COVID-19, 8 AM was not a viable time slot, and after COVID-19 it became one. Similarly with the 5 PM slot, our ADRs found success here prior to COVID-19 but afterwards it was not as productive.

Intuitively, we can align the removal of daily commuting to the sudden viability of the 8 AM time slot.

This suggests that the workday is moving up from 9-5 to 8-4.

Either way, our sweet spot remains 1-5 PM ET pre- and post-COVID-19, with 3-5 PM ET becoming a more successful time period post-COVID-19.

Connecting with peers: 100% growth in new membership in BetterIT

Line chart titled "BetterIT New Members" displaying membership trends from July 2019 to March 2020. The chart illustrates a fluctuating pattern with an overall upward trajectory. A significant peak occurs in March 2020, indicating the highest number of new members during this period. The monthly data points are connected by a smooth line, and each axis is labeled for months and membership numbers respectively.

BetterIT is the premier Slack community for any IT professional looking to connect with her peers. We pride ourselves on the vibrant and diverse community we have built for BetterIT, and were thrilled to see new members flock to the community post-COVID-19.

Specifically, we saw a 100% increase in new members in March and April 2020 compared to February 2020.

As everyone moved to remote work, it made sense that IT admins would lean on the best practices and advice of their peers to navigate these new and challenging times. We look forward to seeing new members continue to join and add unique perspectives.

Our world has changed so drastically in such a short amount of time, but it is comforting to look at the data and validate that trends you expected to change actually did! We will continue to monitor these trends to see if the changes hold in the next six months.

Do you agree with these findings? Have you noticed similar trends? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Join the BetterIT Slack community to share your experiences with your peers!

With companies like Twitter, Shopify, and Facebook announcing long-term or even permanent WFH plans, the workplace will likely never be the same again. For guidance on how to navigate a remote-first world, download our new eBook, The Dream of Remote Work Is Here to Stay: 10 Common IT Pitfalls to Avoid in a World of SaaS.

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