At Produce8, we believe that meaningful change starts with intentional action. That’s why we’re excited to introduce our latest feature, Organization Challenges, designed to help you drive and measure impactful change across your business.



Driving Transformation, One Challenge at a Time



What do we mean by challenges? Whether you’re revamping meeting culture, tackling email overload, or reducing distractions from messaging tools, Organization Challenges empowers your organization to set company-wide initiatives. 

This feature brings visibility to the link between change efforts and impacts to everyone in your business using the Produce8 app, ensuring that your team is involved and engaged with not only their contribution, but to the overall outcome for the business.



Measure What Matters



Understanding the impact of your initiatives is crucial. With Organization Challenges, you can track before-and-after anonymized metrics that show the impact on the average employee. This allows you to see the percentage changes in work habits, helping you gauge the success of your challenges.



Support for Change Champions



No matter who’s leading the charge—internal teams or external experts—Challenges offer a robust toolset to socialize the initiative, engage your workforce, and report on progress. The Produce8 personal dashboard makes it easy to monitor and communicate the results of your efforts.



Stay Connected and Informed



We’ve made it simple to keep track of active and completed challenges. The new Challenges homepage, accessible from your user menu, displays all ongoing initiatives. Plus, the new Challenges resource center on our website offers guidance on maximizing the impact of your productivity and wellness initiatives.



With Organization Challenges, Produce8 is giving you the tools to create lasting, positive change in your organization. Ready to start your first Challenge?

Engage Your Entire Business in Productivity Initiatives 

Managing email overload has become a critical skill for professionals seeking to maintain efficiency and sanity in the workplace. According to Microsoft, some employees dedicate approximately nine hours every week to emails. That’s more than a full workday!

While some roles necessitate responding to incoming emails promptly, many workers check their inboxes impulsively even when their focus should be on other tasks. There are several reasons why knowledge workers feel beholden to their inboxes, including FOMO, the instant gratification of small accomplishments, and poor time management skills.

Constantly checking emails interrupts workflow, making it difficult to maintain concentration on important tasks. This leads to a loss of time and energy. Additionally, this habit can increase stress and anxiety in workers, especially when anticipating new messages and feeling the pressure to respond quickly.

If your team is seeking a way to improve employee well-being and recover time from the inbox, then this article is for you.

Identifying Email Overload

It’s essential to recognize the signs of email overload before tackling it. Here are some indicators that you or your employees might be overwhelmed by emails:

High Interactions in Email App: Regularly checking emails indicates that workers are disengaging from their tasks to attend to messages.

Increased Work Hours: Spending excessive time outside of regular work hours dealing with emails suggests that email management is intruding on personal time.

Insufficient Time Spent on Main Tasks: A decline in productivity occurs when time is spent managing emails instead of focusing on primary tasks.

Want hard data to help identify your team’s email overload problem? Get Produce8. We can show you crucial data and help you fix the issue before it gets worse.

Ready to make some changes? Here are a few approaches you can use to improve email management across your organization.

Improve Email Management

1. Email Batching

Email batching involves grouping your email tasks into specific intervals rather than constantly checking your inbox. This technique can significantly reduce distractions and increase your focus on important tasks. Here's how to implement email batching effectively:

Designate specific times during the day to check and respond to emails. Batches could be first thing in the morning, after lunch, and before the end of the workday.

Disable email notifications to prevent interruptions outside of your designated batch times.

Commit to your email-checking schedule and avoid the temptation to check your inbox in between these times.

2. Time Blocking

Much like email batching, time blocking is a time management technique where you allocate fixed blocks of time to specific tasks or activities. This method can help you manage your email more efficiently while ensuring you have dedicated time for other important tasks. Here's how to use time blocking for email management:

Schedule specific time blocks in your calendar dedicated solely to checking and responding to emails. For example, you might allocate 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the afternoon.

Focus on high-priority tasks outside of your email blocks. Do not allow for email distractions.

Measure your productivity and adjust these time blocks if necessary. The goal is to find a balance that works best for you.

3. Implement the Two-Minute Rule

The two-minute rule is designed to streamline your email management process and minimize time spent on each email. Here’s how to integrate this rule into your daily routine:

Take Immediate Action for Quick Emails: If an email can be responded to in two minutes or less during your designated email blocks, address it immediately. This approach prevents small tasks from piling up. Quick actions might include confirming meeting times, forwarding information, or providing brief answers to straightforward questions.

Schedule Time-Consuming Emails into Your Calendar for Dedicated Time Blocks: Some email responses take more than two minutes. If you don’t want to forget about them, schedule them into your calendar using apps like Gmail and Outlook.

In Gmail, open the email and click on the three-dot menu at the top right corner. Next, select “Create event” to open Google Calendar, where you can set a specific time block for responding to the email.

Similarly, in Outlook, you can drag the email to the Calendar icon to create a new event or appointment. This method allows you to allocate dedicated time to address complex emails, ensuring they receive the attention they need without interrupting your workflow.

4. Manage Your Email Process

Adjust your email management processes to streamline your inbox. This ensures you spend less time organizing and sifting through emails. Here are a few methods you can try:

Use Filters and Labels: Gmail and Outlook both offer filtering and labeling options. Set up filters to automatically sort incoming emails into categories such as urgent, important, and low priority. Labels and folders can also help you identify and manage different types of emails.

Unsubscribe from Unnecessary Newsletters: Over time, your email can become cluttered with newsletters and promotional messages. Schedule a time block to unsubscribe from emails that no longer serve a purpose. This will reduce the volume of emails you receive daily.

Use Templates for Common Responses: For frequently asked questions or recurring topics, create email templates. This saves time, ensures consistent responses, and prevents you from having to write the same message repeatedly.

5. Leverage Email Management Tools

Consider using email management tools and apps that integrate with your email system. These tools can help you track, prioritize, and automate email tasks.

Here are a few email management tools to test:

Superhuman offers a streamlined, minimalistic interface that boosts email efficiency by using features like fast keyboard shortcuts, snooze options, read receipts, and advanced search.

Spark allows team members to discuss emails privately and work together on responses.

SaneBox filters and prioritizes emails, automatically sorting less important messages into separate folders.

Boomerang allows you to schedule emails to be sent later, set follow-up reminders, and temporarily archive emails until you need them.

Clean Email helps you organize and declutter your inbox by grouping similar emails together and then archive or delete them in bulk.

6. Inbox Zero

Inbox Zero is a productivity approach aimed at keeping your inbox empty or near empty at all times. This method helps you stay organized and ensures that no important emails are overlooked. Here's how to achieve Inbox Zero effectively:

Set Up a System: Organize your emails into folders or label them for easy access and sorting. Use categories like “Action Required,” “Waiting on Response,” and “Reference.”

Process Emails Regularly: Dedicate specific times each day to process your emails. During these times, sort your emails into the appropriate folders, delete what’s not needed, and respond to or delegate actionable items.

Use Email Management Tools: Use tools or features like filters, rules, and templates to automate and streamline your email processing.

Maintain the System: Regularly review and clean your inbox to keep it organized. Ensure that new emails are processed promptly to avoid backlog and maintain your Inbox Zero status.

Measure the Effectiveness of the Change

Email overload can be managed with the right strategy. By implementing productivity techniques like email batching and time blocking or making changes to your email management processes, you can significantly reduce interactions with your inbox, allowing you to focus on important tasks and maintain a healthy work-life balance.

However, it’s also possible that productivity hacks for managing emails might not work. For example, Inbox Zero may heighten your email interactions.

Whatever changes you choose to implement, it’s essential to measure their effectiveness. Regularly assess whether these changes are actually helping you manage your inbox more efficiently. Remember, the objective is to find the approach that works best for you and your team.

Use Produce8 to track your progress, measure the impact of your changes, and continually refine your approach to keep improving.

How to Prevent Email Overload at Work: Email Management Tips

Is your team managing time efficiently?

As organizational leaders striving to enhance team performance, it's essential to recognize that not all meetings are created equal. Unfortunately, some are more likely to disrupt the workday and cause employees to lose valuable focus time.

This article explores the traits of disruptive meetings. This knowledge will assist you in establishing the changes necessary for better time management and empower your employees to improve collaboration.

By understanding which types of meetings negatively impact your team, you can implement strategies to minimize these disruptions. Addressing these factors will enable your teams to maintain focus, improve productivity, and foster a more efficient and engaged work environment.

Meetings that cause interruptions

Frequent interruptions in the form of meetings can significantly disrupt an employee's focus and productivity.

Ad hoc meetings, often scheduled spontaneously to address immediate issues, can cause interruptions in the workplace. These unscheduled sessions break the flow of planned work and force employees to shift their focus abruptly, leading to a significant loss of time. By minimizing ad hoc meetings and finding alternative ways to address urgent matters, organizations can preserve the focus of workers.

By identifying these meetings, addressing whether they are a problem, and implementing strategies to manage their frequency and timing, businesses can help employees maintain better time management throughout their workday.

Consider introducing asynchronous collaboration or having a meeting-free workday.

Produce8 is a digital work analytics platform that enables you to understand how you are currently running meetings and whether the changes you’ve made are having the desired outcome.

Poorly scheduled meetings

Poorly scheduled meetings — especially recurring meetings or cross-functional meetings — can significantly disrupt productivity. If not regularly reviewed, these meetings can become habitual and hinder peak productivity periods.

Many recurring meetings, such as daily stand-ups, team huddles, and regular check-ins, while brief, interrupt the start of the workday and impede focus during an employee’s most productive working hours. These meetings act as anchor points that employees anticipate, preventing them from getting into a flow beforehand and requiring time to mentally refocus afterward.

To resolve these scheduling issues, teams and organizations can establish clear guidelines for meeting scheduling, including preferred times and notice periods. Because everyone has different productive work times, encourage employees to block out focus time on their calendars and set meeting-free zones during specific times or days to minimize disruptions.

Additionally, reviewing the necessity of recurring meetings and canceling or combining those that are no longer essential can prevent unnecessary interruptions. We challenge your organization to take the Great Workdays Kickoff for Organizations to identify how scheduled meetings are impacting productivity.

Meetings that run over time

Brainstorming sessions, project kickoff meetings, and strategic planning meetings are prime examples of meetings that extend past their scheduled time, as they involve sharing extensive details and engaging in open-ended conversations.

A common cause for meetings running over time is not having a clear goal at the start or failing to set a time limit to reach that goal. Even with well-defined objectives, relying on a committee to reach a consensus can be challenging. Ensuring that all discussions and decisions stay aligned with the meeting’s objectives can help, but sometimes reducing the number of participants is necessary to streamline discussions. We will go into more detail about this in the following section.

How often do meetings run over in your organization? Analyze the data in the Produce8 workspace timeline.

By recognizing lengthy meetings and implementing strategies to keep discussions focused and time-boxed, businesses can ensure that their employees’ time and energy are spent in the right place.

Meetings with too many participants

If we all know that having too many participants in a meeting can be detrimental, why does it keep happening? Because of over-inclusiveness, unclear roles, and a fear of missing out. Hierarchical pressure and ambiguous meeting objectives can also lead to excessive invitations. But most often, it simply occurs out of habit.

To manage participant numbers effectively, businesses must first understand the average sizes of their meetings and decipher how many hours are spent in meetings with a large participation list.

Produce8 allows you to see how much time is spent in meetings by size — and the average cost to the business:

After you’ve identified the problem, you can have more efficient discussions with your team by keeping meetings to a manageable size. Segment meetings, use representatives, and leverage technology for asynchronous work to help streamline discussions.

Recovering focus time from meetings

Meetings are affecting employee focus time and well-being. We cannot ignore that fact any longer — especially when gathering a group of people together is easier than ever. We must come to understand how we conduct meetings and determine whether changes are actually improving the workday.

By gathering data on current meeting practices, you can pinpoint specific issues such as excessive participation, poor scheduling, or lengthy durations. With this data in hand, bring the team together and come to an agreement on necessary changes. Then implement strategies tailored to address these issues.

By continuing to measure and analyze meeting data, you can assess the effectiveness of these changes. And by committing to data-driven decision-making and continuous improvement, your organization can optimize meeting practices and better support team performance.

We encourage your teams and organizations to measure the time they spend in meetings and start improving their workdays by starting the Great Workdays Kickoff for Organization. Reach out to Produce8 if you’re up for it. We can get your whole organization set up and feeling empowered to take back control of the workday.


Types of Meetings Affecting Focus Time

Understanding the impact of meeting overload on business efficiency is crucial. Meetings are essential for collaboration and decision-making, but excessive and poorly managed meetings can significantly drain an organization’s resources and hinder productivity.

Struggling to help your teams have better workdays? You’re not alone! In this article, we will analyze some of the most shocking statistics around meeting overload and help you examine your organization's current meeting culture. Armed with this knowledge, you can make changes to improve employee satisfaction and overall operational efficiency.

1. There Are Too Many Meetings

The average employee participates in at least eight meetings each week, which equates to more than one meeting per day. This number only increases with seniority, as the average executive manager attends at least 12 meetings per week.

This data underscores the need to evaluate how these frequent meetings impact your workday.

2. Meetings Are Expensive

Unproductive meetings are a significant concern, with an estimated $37 billion lost annually in the United States due to inefficient meetings, according to Flowtrace.

Understanding the financial cost of these meetings can help businesses realize the importance of streamlining their processes. Enter Produce8, which can show you the organizational cost of meetings.

3. Meetings Are Draining

One in four employees suffer from “Zoom fatigue” during meetings, according to Pew Research. This emphasizes the importance of considering the mental and physical toll of excessive meetings on employees.

4. Scheduling Meetings Is Work

Office workers waste an average of one hour and 42 minutes per week scheduling and rescheduling calls. This suggests that improving scheduling efficiency could free up significant time for more valuable work.

5. Meetings Are Getting Longer

Time spent in meetings has been rising by 8% to 10% every year since 2000. Recognizing this trend can help businesses implement strategies to curb the increasing length of meetings.

Produce8 allows your team to easily see the scheduled block for meetings in their Calendar. This enables your organization to have a better grasp on how long meetings are lasting.

6. Meetings Have Too Many Attendees

More than 22% of meetings have at least eight attendees, according to Fellow. This results in over 15 hours of meetings per week on average, leaving little time for execution.

This data shows that smaller, more focused meetings could be more effective.

7. Unscheduled and Ad Hoc Meetings

Sixty-six percent (66%) of 1:1 calls are unscheduled, according to HBR. This means that employees’ workdays are often interrupted with spontaneous video calls on apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams. These interruptions disrupt their workflow and focus.

8. Meetings Cause Delays

Seventy percent (70%) of meetings cause delays in completing essential work, according to research from Bloomberg. This aligns with findings that indicate 92% of workers feel meetings keep them from their regular work duties.

Such disruptions highlight the need for more efficient meeting practices, which can ensure that essential tasks are not sidelined.

We Can Fix This

While meetings are a vital aspect of business operations, their overabundance can be a significant drain on time, resources, and employee morale.

Here’s one last stat for you: A Harvard Business Review study found that when companies reduced meeting time by 40%, worker productivity increased by 70%. But we know that the solution is not as simple as cutting out meetings from your schedule. After all, your team still needs to collaborate. Instead, we’re suggesting you stop running initiatives without data.

Produce8 helps the whole team get on the same page regarding the current meeting culture. By linking their calendar and meeting apps, teams can address meeting issues with data-driven insights, allowing everyone to measure the effectiveness of changes.

Interested in seeing how meetings are impacting your organization? Book a live demo with our team.

Too Many Meetings? Here Are 8 Stats You Need to Know About How Meetings Cost Businesses

For decades, managed service providers (MSPs) have worked behind the scenes to support businesses and ensure uninterrupted access to essential tools and resources for troubleshooting technical issues.

As knowledge work evolved from local area networks (LANs) and on-premises, MSPs transformed their businesses to optimize employee digital experiences. Today, clients look to MSPs both for technical support and strategic guidance.

There’s a huge opportunity available today. We believe the future of MSP work requires a shift from solely providing technology products and services to becoming advisors on the impact of technology on productivity (and people). For customers who want to understand how technology is consumed, MSPs can help.

Organizations with knowledge workers allocate a significant portion of their budget—75%—towards salaries, HR, and productivity initiatives. This directly impacts employee effectiveness and satisfaction.

In contrast, technology products and services provided by MSPs typically constitute only 5% of the budget. This disparity underscores the need to prioritize investments that enhance employee digital experience and improve overall performance and employee well-being.

By focusing on enhancing overall business productivity, MSPs can deliver greater value. The employee digital experience is integral to every aspect of work life, and MSPs will ideally be positioned as indispensable partners in driving productivity and organizational success.

What is the employee digital experience?

Employee digital experience refers to the overall digital interactions and experiences employees have within their organization. It highlights the integration of digital tools and platforms into the broader employee experience framework, ensuring that technology enhances rather than hinders employee productivity, satisfaction, and well-being.

Employee digital experience encompasses various dimensions of how employees interact with digital tools and the environment within their organization. It integrates employee experience (EX), which covers overall employee interactions and engagements across the workplace, with digital employee experience (DEX), which focuses specifically on the quality of digital interfaces and the tools workers use.

Additionally, it encompasses digital experience (DX), which extends beyond internal systems to include all digital interactions employees have, whether through websites, mobile apps, or external platforms.

Together, these frameworks ensure a holistic approach to enhancing productivity, satisfaction, and well-being by optimizing digital workflows and interactions throughout the employee journey.

A good employee digital experience is seamless, secure, and intuitive. However, for many workers, constant distractions and an overwhelming array of collaboration apps and tools often mar the experience.

Instead of empowering employees, these digital tools provided by MSPs lead to frustration and decreased productivity as workers spend more time in virtual meetings, navigating broken workflows, or searching for files rather than performing their core tasks.

But here’s the good news: MSPs are equipped to help them fix this.

The role of MSP vCIOs

Creating better workdays starts by empowering workers with data to properly optimize daily workflows and improve productivity. This allows them to identify the root of problems, make informed changes, and measure whether they are achieving the desired results.

MSP virtual Chief Information Officers (vCIOs) are well-suited to help their clients acquire advanced work analytic tools like Produce8. These tools offer clients insights into the factors that may be impairing worker productivity.

By leveraging this data, they can point to areas for improvement and collaborate with vCIOs to strategize. Overall, they can get recommendations to create a more efficient and satisfying work environment.

MSPs' clients are increasingly eager to learn about productivity as they recognize the role it plays in achieving business success. Clients are open to exploring new solutions and leveraging data-driven insights to understand work patterns, eliminate bottlenecks, and enhance overall performance without compromising work culture. They are ready to embrace digital work analytics, and MSPs that embrace it too can position themselves as advisors, differentiate themselves in a competitive marketplace, and create a new revenue stream.

MSPs and the evolution of digital work

To properly advise your customers regarding how technology impacts productivity, you must adopt the same mindset and approach used when initially developing your business application services or establishing your MSSP cybersecurity practice. Like RMM/PSA, work analytics is a platform investment, not just another tool in your tech stack.

We have watched MSPs successfully evolve for years, and we foresee the next phase of transformation being in the productivity and employee digital experience space. To put all this in context, allow me to share some historical milestones and the trajectory of digital work for MSPs.

Distributed Workplaces (1995–2000+): MSPs started by rolling out web-based tools like email and LAN networking, which helped boost collaboration and connectivity within organizations. As workplaces spread out, MSPs stepped up by adding WAN and VPN solutions, along with email servers, to keep communication smooth and reliable for remote teams.

Cloud and Mobile Transformation (2005+): MSPs provided their clients with tools to improve communication and schedule management. They introduced early collaboration platforms like SharePoint and VOIP-based telephony applications, making it easier to work flexibly and efficiently across different locations. And by integrating cloud business solutions and strong mobile device management, MSPs ensured data security and compliance while supporting the increasing mobility of the workforce.

Web-Based Communication (2015+): MSPs added several cloud solutions to their services, which changed how businesses operated. Essential to this shift was collaborative messaging tools and virtual meeting setups, which ensured smooth communication and teamwork among remote teams. Through cloud-based platforms, MSPs offered scalable solutions that went beyond traditional physical limits, allowing for real-time collaboration and information sharing across any distance.

Remote Worker Infrastructure (2020+): As remote work took off, MSPs introduced virtual calling apps to support remote collaboration and communication. They also started focusing on solutions to better understand employee dynamics, marking a big shift in their role. However, their clients were just starting to understand the complexities of productivity and well-being in the workplace, highlighting the need for nuanced tools that go beyond mere employee monitoring. This is where we noticed the increasing demand among MSPs and their clients for digital work analytics. Thus, Produce8 was born.

Managed AI and the Future of the Employee Experience (2023+): As AI becomes more common in the digital work world, both leaders and employees must come to understand its impact on organizational success. With AI-driven applications and digital work analytics, MSPs can help their clients use data-driven insights to navigate new technologies and workflows. MSPs are uniquely positioned to guide businesses through these changes, offering the tools and strategies needed to boost productivity, streamline operations, and support sustainable growth in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

As the role of MSPs further evolves, their historical expertise and ability to devise forward-thinking strategies aligns them perfectly to improve the employee digital experience, making them invaluable partners in shaping the future of work.

Join the Produce8 MSP Partner Program

Now is the perfect time for MSPs to equip their clients with productivity and work analytics tools like Produce8. As the digital work landscape continues to evolve, organizations need deeper insights into their workflows to enhance efficiency and drive success.

By joining the Partner Program, MSPs gain access to a comprehensive suite of tools and resources designed to implement these advanced solutions effectively. This empowers MSPs to offer unparalleled value to their clients, positioning themselves as leaders in the industry while opening up new revenue streams. Joining the Partner Program ensures MSPs have everything they need to support their clients in achieving operational excellence.



Evolving MSP vCIO Services: Shaping the Future of Employee Digital Experience

Produce8 provides digital work analytics to help the clients of MSPs measure and fix the impact of technology on employee productivity and wellbeing.

Vancouver, BC, Canada (June 19, 2024) – Produce8, a leading work analytics software vendor, today announced the launch of its new Managed Service Provider (MSP) Partner Program. This initiative is designed to enable MSPs to offer their clients Produce8’s advanced work analytics tools, enhancing productivity, optimizing operations, and improving employee experience.

Produce8 offers detailed insights and analytics for organizations to make data-driven decisions to help them address the challenges that impair productivity and empower individual employees with tools to manage their workday more effectively.

“MSPs have been supporting the entire stack of collaboration and communications technology for their clients for years,” said Marco La Vecchia, CRO at Produce8. “These same technologies are now implicated in impairing the productivity of employees with notifications, meeting overload, messaging distraction, context switching, and too much time spent responding to emails. We think MSPs are ideally suited to help their customers understand the impact of technology on the productivity and wellbeing of their knowledge worker employees.”

Differentiation and Strategic Value for MSPs

The Produce8 MSP Partner Program offers MSPs significant value by differentiating their business, offering a new recurring revenue stream, and increasing the value they provide to their customers. It allows MSPs to move from advising purely on technology-related investments to providing strategic input on factors that impact employee-related costs, which are four times higher than IT-related expenditures. The overlap between people and technology is something MSPs have not yet been able to address with their vCIO consulting practices.

“All businesses are facing increasing demands to address the productivity and engagement of knowledge workers and to address the increasing frequency of employee burnout that is at least partially driven by the way we now work,” said Joel Abramson, CEO of Produce8. “Our partner program is designed to equip MSPs with a unique offering to help their clients meet these challenges head-on. By joining our program, MSPs can enhance their service offerings and help their clients overcome the challenges of the modern digital workplace.”

Key Features of the Produce8 MSP Partner Program:

Technical Support and Resources: Comprehensive technical tools and support to ensure seamless integration and implementation for MSPs' clients.

Marketing and Sales Resources: Access to go-to-market strategies and sales support to help MSPs effectively promote and sell Produce8 to their clients.

Educational and Training Materials: Ongoing training to keep partners updated on the latest features and best practices.

Partner Tiers: Flexible tiers (Select, Premier, Elite) to cater to different levels of partner engagement and business needs.

To learn more MSPs are invited to visit www.produce8.com/msp-partner-program and to register to join an upcoming partner webinar.

Produce8 Introduces Partner Program for Managed Service Providers 

For years, MSPs have received requests to find solutions that aid their clients in enhancing productivity and performance. However, constrained by limited options, they frequently default to recommending products primarily geared toward employee monitoring.

You and your clients have decided to avoid employee monitoring and traditional productivity tracking tools. The main reason is simple: These tools often violate employee trust and fail to address the underlying issues that hinder workplace productivity.

However, the challenges of optimizing work efficiency and ensuring effective collaboration still persist. So, what’s the next step?

What factors of work are impairing productivity?

First, let’s understand the ongoing challenges of digital work!

We spend a lot of time discussing employee productivity but often overlook the biggest factors that impair it. Distracting communication tools, excessive time lost in meetings, and the high costs of context switching significantly undermine knowledge worker productivity.

These issues create a fragmented work environment, where constant interruptions and shifting focus prevent teams from achieving deep, meaningful work. To truly enhance productivity, we must address these underlying challenges and implement strategies that minimize distractions, streamline communication, and reduce the inefficiencies caused by frequent context switching.

1. Excessive time wasted in meetings and collaborations

Scenario: Your clients don’t realize how much time is being lost via unproductive meetings and excessive collaboration. Without clear data, it's difficult to identify and eliminate these time sinks.

Solution: Rather than using monitoring tools to micromanage team interactions, focus on gathering data to understand the discrepancy between planned activities and actual occurrences. This will help your client’s team identify and reduce ad hoc meetings, which often unexpectedly consume significant portions of the day. Providing MSP clients with this insight allows them to regain control over their schedules and prioritize their tasks.

2. Distractions from messaging apps and emails

Scenario: Your client’s team struggles to stay focused due to constant interruptions from messaging apps and email notifications, which can severely impact productivity.

Solution: Empower your clients to understand their work habits and make informed decisions about managing their time and applications. Encourage them to adjust notification settings and plan their day to minimize distractions. By fostering a culture of self-awareness and personal accountability, they can develop strategies to maintain focus and enhance their productivity.

3. Time spent on work about work

Scenario: Your client’s team spends significant time on "work about work," which leads to productive time leaks. This includes context-switching between multiple tasks, searching for information across numerous apps, and using tools that do not align with organizational goals.

Solution: Help your client gain a clear understanding of how workflows are costing them time by providing them insight into their workday. Analyze how they switch between tasks and identify tools that cause inefficiencies. Encourage the use of applications that support the organization's objectives and facilitate focused work on high-impact tasks. This approach ensures the client’s team’s efforts are aligned with overall goals, thus maximizing productivity and effectiveness.

A new approach to productivity

To address these three factors impairing the workday, help your clients implement a solution that provides actionable insights without compromising employee trust. Digital work analytics platforms like Produce8 offer a comprehensive view of how work is being done, enabling you to make informed decisions that benefit both the organization and its employees.

Produce8 differentiates itself from monitoring tools in three distinct ways:

Empowerment through transparency: Produce8 provides employees with visibility into their work patterns and productivity metrics. By giving individuals control over their data and insights, Produce8 enables them to actively participate in the optimization of their work habits and performance by running personal productivity challenges.

Insightful analytics for actionable solutions: Instead of inundating users with raw data, Produce8 distills complex metrics into clear, actionable insights that empower organizations to make informed decisions. Whether it's identifying bottlenecks in workflows, detecting trends in collaboration patterns, or optimizing resource allocation, Produce8 equips businesses with the knowledge needed to drive meaningful improvements.

Focus on collaboration and engagement: By providing visibility into collective work patterns and collaboration dynamics, Produce8 encourages communication, knowledge sharing, and synergy among team members. This collaborative approach enhances productivity and cultivates a sense of camaraderie and cohesion within the workforce.

What’s the difference between employee monitoring tools and work analytics?

Unlike employee monitoring tools, which may focus solely on surveillance and compliance, a digital work analytics tool provides deeper insights into how work is performed.

Ultimately, a digital work analytics tool identifies productivity challenges while equipping organizations with the insights they need to make impactful changes and take control of their workday.

Join the Produce8 Partnership Program

If your goal is to maintain trust and morale, avoiding employee monitoring and traditional productivity tracking tools is a step in the right direction. However, the need to address productivity challenges remains.

By leveraging digital work analytics, you can empower your clients and their teams to understand and improve their work habits and align their efforts with organizational goals. This approach ensures that they have the tools and insights needed to work more efficiently and effectively — without the invasive scrutiny of monitoring tools. Embrace this solution to drive meaningful change and enhance productivity across your organization.

Reach out to our team of productivity experts and we can get you set up in the Produce8 Partner Program. This way, your MSP will have everything it needs to empower your clients to take back control of their day.

MSP Clients' Struggles With Employee Monitoring Tools: Redefining Productivity Solutions

This whitepaper will show you how to cross the chasm from providing technology products and services to becoming business productivity experts and supporting the employee's digital experience.  

The MSP industry is hyper-competitive. MSPs must differentiate themselves from the other 100 competitors in their region, who essentially all offer the same services—managed IT, security, automation, on-premise and cloud services, etc.

When analyzing your competitors, ask yourself, "How unique is my MSP value proposition for new and existing customers?"

At Produce8, we believe the future of work requires MSPs to cross the chasm from providing technology products and services to becoming business productivity experts.

The history of the MSP model

Over the past two decades, the MSP model has grown through three main phases:

Managed IT and security: In the 2000s, managed services saw traditional value-added resellers (VARs) and system integrators shift from one-off, break-fix IT support to monthly recurring revenue models.

Pioneered by RMM and PSA platforms, this transition enabled remote monitoring, management, and automation of service delivery, fostering proactive support. These platforms have since become industry leaders, expanding into security, business applications, data backup, and more.

Cloud applications: In 2011, the launch of Microsoft 365 caused concern in the industry regarding the future of MSP services. What would MSPs manage if everything shifted to the cloud and large vendors offered their own remote managed services?

Despite these fears, the industry thrived. MSPs began delivering more value through virtual chief information officer (vCIO) services and developing business applications in areas like ERP, CRM, and cloud services. By the end of the 2010s, digital marketplaces for cloud apps and related services had become more prevalent.

Cybersecurity: MSPs have always offered information security services for SMBs, but demand for advanced MSSP cybersecurity services has surged in the past five years.

At MSP events, cybersecurity vendors now dominate half the tradeshow floor. Despite significant opportunities, the typical MSP do-it-yourself model faces challenges in profitability, liability, and scalability.

There’s no doubt that cybersecurity has revitalized the typical MSP vCIO service. However, beyond the challenges of building a cyber practice and the scarcity of qualified resources, most business owners view cybersecurity as a necessary evil. The conversation is generally negative, as most small and medium businesses believe they already pay their MSP for security.

So, what’s next for MSPs?

MSP clients are ready to understand productivity

Productivity and work analytics discussions are new and compelling to business owners who care about their workers. Who better than your vCIO, who guided the business through its digital transformation, to deliver this new, high-value service? Consider the discussions and ancillary revenue opportunities that can arise from having data that shows how an organization utilizes its tech daily.

MSPs must be experts in productivity and work analytics

Productivity is a complex metric to measure for both the people and technology that businesses invest in. Interestingly, the digital transformation SMBs have undergone actually provides most of the data needed to shift productivity measurement from anecdotal to data-driven.

To achieve this, MSPs must offer a work analytics platform like Produce8, which collects data from three main sources:

Interactions and time spent in applications and websites, calendar information, and calls/meetings data

Business impact reporting, such as the cost of meetings across the organization, application usage, and collaboration overload

Metrics to make informed decisions and show the impact of changes

Produce8 allows end users to control their data, a critical step for employee adoption within an organization. While productivity and efficiency are business priorities, digital well-being, better workflow, meeting overload, and employee sentiment and experience are what drive end-user adoption.

Offering this solution to your customers allows you to transform into a new practice area that differentiates you from the competition, helping you win new customers and retain and expand your current MRR base.

On top of addressing the productivity challenges from legacy tools, leveraging the Produce8 work analytics platform will also prepare you for the next frontier of technology: AI.

What is Managed AI?

Managed AI refers to the provision of artificial intelligence (AI) services and solutions for your clients. These services typically include the deployment, management, and optimization of AI technologies to meet the specific needs of businesses. By including work analytics in these offerings, you can ensure that AI tools are properly adopted by your client and are driving your intended results.

Generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLM) are here, and there’s no doubt they will change the world, including the MSP universe. While the current AI focus is more consumer-related or involves basic use cases like call centers, the rapid pace at which large technology vendors are innovating and investing means new applications of AI are emerging constantly. Interestingly, the primary use case for AI is productivity.

In this era of AI, MSPs will need to reinvent themselves once again. Many manual tasks, such as helpdesk support, will be automated. Digital marketplaces and Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors may increasingly encroach on MSP territory. And SMBs will require fewer people to accomplish the same amount of work.

We believe thought-leading MSPs that embrace productivity and work analytics today will be well-positioned to address the number one challenge with AI: creating guardrails for its usage within a business.

Managed AI service providers that utilize work analytics will understand how hundreds of technology applications are used, where best to leverage AI, and how to measure its impact on employee work patterns.

Getting Started with the Produce8 Partner Program

Becoming a productivity expert for your customers requires the same "building-a-new-MSP-practice" mentality and methodology you used when you first entered the managed IT arena, built your business application practice, or developed your MSSP cybersecurity practice. Like RMM/PSA, digital work analytics is a platform investment, not just another widget in your tech stack.

As a result, the Produce8 Partner Program combines our work analytics platform, purpose-built for MSPs, with a comprehensive set of technical, go-to-market, and partner development resources. And it’s all supported by a team of experts.



Productivity and Work Analytics: The Next Managed Service Practice

In recent years, MSPs have been receiving frequent requests from their clients to help them understand their employees and improve productivity in remote, hybrid, and digital work environments.

We’ve spoken with hundreds of MSPs who feel pressured to source solutions for their clients because they are unaware of alternative options. This problem often translates to using employee monitoring tools, which don't actually address the root problem of productivity.

Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Employee productivity has become a notable concern ever since COVID-19, and it’s led to clients turning to their MSPs to recommend solutions. However, consistently suggesting employee monitoring tools to solve productivity problems just doesn’t feel right.

At Produce8, we offer work analytics that empower individuals, teams, and organizations to tackle productivity issues with a completely different approach. We’ve designed our product to help you and your clients understand factors that impair productivity while giving individuals complete control over their data.

Understanding Your Clients’ Productivity Needs

Giving your clients what they want and what they need is not always clear, especially when it comes to productivity. While some clients want employee monitoring tools or traditional productivity trackers, others may want more actionable insights their employees can learn from.

Take a look at your current client base. They probably sit in one of these five buckets.

If these client groups look familiar, we can help you re-engage them and offer a solution that sets your MSP apart from competitors. To do this, we must come to understand the challenges they face and address why employee monitoring tools and traditional productivity trackers are not the right solution.

Employee Monitoring Software Is Not Useful for Solving Productivity Issues

At its core, employee monitoring software isn't designed to boost productivity. Its primary aim is often more about oversight than optimization. Sure, it can give managers a bird's-eye view of what employees are up to, but that doesn't automatically translate to a more productive workforce.

As you may have experienced, some clients recognize that employee monitoring leads to fear as a motivator, which is not great for culture or productivity. They also know that employee monitoring doesn't address challenges that high performers face (such as overworking, which can lead to lowered productivity), doesn't create dialogue, and often misinterprets the workday.

Clearly understanding productivity is about far more than tracking what every employee is doing. Many MSPs (like yours) are searching for a tool that balances organizational objectives with employee productivity and well-being.

Achieving this all starts with giving employees the data they need to make informed changes. In other words, we must enable them to understand their workday.

Understanding and Solving the Real Problems

Your clients might want employee monitoring tools—but they might not.

What you need to do is help them determine whether they want to protect their company from time and property theft or if they want to empower their employees and help them understand what is impairing productivity. To do that, we need to understand the source of the real problem.

In the last four years, digital distractions have been on the rise. It's no wonder people are having a hard time focusing on their work.

Then there's collaboration overload. Thanks to all these new communication tools like Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, it feels like meetings have taken over our entire calendar.

Oh, and let’s not forget broken workflows. You know, when your employees spend a huge number of their work hours searching for documents and information.

All in all, it seems like everything's a mess. So, it’s not surprising that your clients believe there is a productivity problem. There is. And the first step to solving this problem is understanding how the team works — not with employee monitoring, but with analytics that can be accessed collectively. Then the team can work together to make changes and measure whether they’re effective.

Produce8 Can Help You and Your Clients

MSPs have a golden opportunity to make a difference for their clients by tackling these modern workplace woes head-on. Instead of slapping on another Band-Aid solution like employee monitoring, MSPs can offer work analytics that empower the whole team.

Rather than equipping managers so they can watch what everyone's doing, work analytics dive deep into how teams actually work. It's all about understanding work habits, identifying pain points, coming together to have real discussions, and then making real, effective changes that enable everyone to do their best work.

Choose work analytics. Avoid employee monitoring. It’s just that simple.

Ready to lead your clients and help them finally solve their productivity challenges? Allow us to share our plan to help you re-engage them by providing the data they need and want.

Let’s revisit the different types of clients:

After segmenting your clients and their specific needs, we recommend re-engaging them with the following approach:

Reach out to those in the Client 4 group first. They understand that productivity is a big factor in their team’s success and that work analytics can help them immediately.

Next, start the conversation with those in the Client 5 group. These are new clients who haven’t made requests yet, but they are primed to have that conversation around analytics.

Afterward, reach out to the Client 3 group, and then the Client 2 group. These customers have already purchased employee monitoring tools, and while one is happier than the other about the solution, they are still ready to hear about the alternatives. 

As for the Client 1 group, there is no rush to re-engage them. However, when the opportunity arises, don’t hesitate to bring up a new solution to help their workers improve their workday with analytics.

How to Introduce Produce8 to Your Clients

As an MSP, engaging with your clients effectively means providing them with tools that empower and enhance their productivity without compromising trust. Produce8 is designed to do exactly that. As a digital work analytics tool, we’re helping employees understand the work experience through personal data insights.

These insights address productivity barriers such as meetings, messaging, email, task switching, and skipping breaks. By tracking improvements, Produce8 tackles major causes of low productivity in knowledge work, enabling clients to streamline workflows, optimize collaboration, and eliminate digital distractions. This approach builds a culture of continuous improvement and learning, shifting the focus from monitoring to meaningful engagement and understanding.

What sets Produce8 apart is its commitment to privacy and transparency. Unlike employee monitoring software, Produce8’s digital analytics software requires everyone to opt in, ensuring they are always aware of the data they share and retain full control over it. Employees only share interactions with work tools that are relevant to what they want to measure, avoiding invasive practices like random screenshots or keystroke tracking. This results in insights that inform better workdays without the feeling of being spied on.

Once the team understands their work patterns, they can make changes that lead to smoother workflows, better collaboration, and fewer distractions. This data-driven approach sparks conversations about the impact of these changes, ensuring positive outcomes for productivity and employee satisfaction.

Partner With Produce8

Produce8 allows everyone to get on the same page and focus on solving the same problems.

The next time your clients come to you with a request to find a monitoring tool to help their team with productivity, you can instead steer them away from products that just don’t work and towards Produce8, a platform dedicated to helping everyone have better workdays without creating a culture of mistrust and fear.

Currently, the biggest productivity challenges involve employees being distracted by the very technology you support for your clients. Improving the employee experience can boost productivity and is rapidly becoming a new and differentiating strategy for virtual chief information officers (vCIOs).

If you truly care about helping your clients conquer the chaos of the modern workplace and unleash their full potential, it's time to join the Produce8 partnership program.

By teaming with Produce8, you're equipping your team to guide your clients on a journey of self-discovery and helping them uncover hidden insights about how they work. You’ll also be well on your way to making strategic changes that drive real results and enable your MSP to create a difference.

So, what are you waiting for? Join the Produce8 partnership program today. Let's start transforming the way we work, one client at a time.

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Challenges to help you build better habits and get things done

Time blocking is a time management method that involves dividing your day into blocks of time, with each block dedicated to accomplishing a specific task or group of tasks. This technique helps in organizing your day more efficiently, ensuring that you allocate time to important activities without the day slipping away into less productive tasks.

Effective time blocking will manifest as a well-structured timeline, fewer distractions from low-priority apps, and a higher focus score, demonstrating better productivity and focused work. These KPIs are crucial for assessing the effectiveness of your time management approach.

Time Blocking Challenge Outcome 

Want to have better workdays? We can help!

Time Blocking Challenge

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. It breaks work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks. These intervals are known as "pomodoros," the Italian word for tomatoes, named after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer Cirillo used as a university student.


Your timeline will distinctly show each Pomodoro work block and break. Engagement with distracting apps should decrease, and when used, it should be more purposeful. Enhanced focus from dedicated work sessions should result in a higher focus score.


Pomodoro Technique Challenge Outcome 

Want to have better workdays? We can help! 

Pomodoro Technique Challenge

Monk Mode is a productivity approach where you deeply focus on your work by minimizing distractions, akin to the focused and minimalistic lifestyle of a monk. This mode involves dedicating extended periods to work intensely on a single task or project, often in isolation, to maximize productivity and quality of output.

With successful Monk Mode application, anticipate extended periods of focused app usage, minimal distractions from irrelevant apps, and better digital intensity and focus scores, all signaling increased productivity.


Monk Mode Challenge Outcome

Monk Mode Challenge

Want to learn more about improving your focus, teamwork and digital wellness?

Wether you are collaborating with your team or solo tackling your day we can help you recover the most valuable asset, time.

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Register for our next webinar 'The Next MSP Growth Strategy: Fixing the Digital Workplace'

The Adopting Asynchronous Video Meeting Challenge is an approach designed to enhance workplace flexibility and efficiency by shifting from traditional synchronous meetings to asynchronous video meetings. This challenge encourages teams to utilize video messages and recorded presentations as alternatives to live meetings, aiming to reduce the need for coordinating schedules across different time zones or disrupting deep work periods.

Successfully implementing the Adopting Asynchronous Video Meeting approach will lead to fewer hours spent in live meetings and enhanced productivity through the use of asynchronous communication methods.


Adopting Asynchronous Video Meeting Challenge Outcome

Adopting Asynchronous Video Challenge

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It doesn’t have to be all synchronous or all asynchronous. Find the balance for your team. Measure what is or isn’t working.

It’s also worth repeating that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You can blend asynchronous work with synchronous work.

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