Return on investment is at the forefront of every business leader’s mind when it comes to marketing initiatives and customer experience. Why? Because these things are important to attracting and retaining customers and increasing their business’s bottom line.

But while spending ample time in these areas is both necessary and important, external metrics aren’t all you should be worried about. If you want real and continued business success, you have to also focus on measuring internal operations.

Your business is nothing without your employees. So whether you’re considering getting new technology, renovating your current office space or building a new building to bring on 20 new hires, the only way to maximize your ROI with these types of internal decisions is to find a system that gives you the right data to make better-informed decisions about staffing, your workspace and technology and equipment costs and get employee input.

All businesses generate data, thanks to the digitally driven world we live in. But you need an efficient way to gather and analyze quantitative data so you can turn it into actionable information. Don’t forget about utilizing qualitative data too, which is where anecdotal employee input comes into play. Combining these two data types is a surefire way to reduce costs and increase benefits.

Here’s how you can more effectively discover the real ROI of the two different types of workplace analytics.

Measuring Employee Input

If you expect your employees to put their blood, sweat and tears into their daily work, you have to give them what they want, to a degree. If employees are bringing their own lamps and plants to their desks, you might consider changing your office lighting or adding more windows. If you’re noticing higher absenteeism and sickness than normal, it might be time to implement a wellness program or check-in on your company culture.

Money isn’t the only thing that makes people happy. In fact, more employees just want to be given support, appreciation and autonomy with their work. And when you do that, you’ll have happy employees, which research has found are 12% more productive than unhappy employees.

So how do you get truly honest employee feedback? How do you know what changes to make without assuming what’s best? You ask your employees. Surveys are an easy solution to find out what’s working, what’s not and what business ideas employees have. Another way is holding regular one-on-one check-in meetings with employees where you ask insightful questions. If you have a large company, you can’t do this on your own, but your managers can meet with everyone they oversee and then report back to you.

You never know what you can find out until you ask. On average, employers who increase their investments in employee engagement by 10% increase their business profits by $2,400 per employee each year. So get employee input and buy-in before making big business decisions.

Measuring Quantitative Analytics

While employee input is invaluable, analytical data is what gives you more tangible insights about how your organization uses the space you work in. And getting the most out of your analytics greatly depends on the data-tracking system you employ.

The areas of focus you want your system to give data on should include:

• Meeting room utilization
• Number of meetings and number of their attendees
• Total office space and floor usage.

These areas will help you quickly see how much time and money you’re actually wasting and what needs to change or be improved to better support your employees.

Let’s say for example you’ve noticed that your sales team meets frequently every day, and often resort to meeting at their desks as they don’t have adequate meeting space or technology. You’ve heard chatter that this lack of privacy and technology is causing frustration on the team. By comparing their chatter and usage data, you can make a sound business decision that the sales team’s floor needs a tech-heavy conference room that’s soundproofed.

Besides tracking these things, you also want a system that will provide real-time insights about your employees, your technology and equipment, interaction with technology and your physical office space.

As you can see, with the right information, you can boost employee productivity while minimizing office costs. And who doesn’t want both of these results?