Workplace Analytics – your built-in knowledge generator

Your business evolves and revolves around the external market strain and the internal decisions you make. External factors are difficult to predict and act upon proactively. But should your internal processes also be a black box?

It is challenging to manage your business not knowing what actually goes on. It is virtually impossible to be present in every meeting and to observe what each employee deals with on a regular basis. So, what if your workplace behavior could be analyzed and reported back to you by the system?

Microsoft Workplace Analytics is an intelligent solution which gives you instant access to the relevant metrics you need, to make informed business decisions and evolve internally. Microsoft Workplace Analytics is your silent, yet diligent business companion which generates the knowledge you need from the system metadata it accesses natively 24/7.

Organizations can tap into their productivity insights the hard way or the easy way.

On a regular office day, people must strike a balance between the time they allot for: company communications (informative content), meetings (business decisions), and their actual daily tasks (added value work). The effort required to engage with the three main types of activities produces a different daily cocktail which is more or less easy to digest.

• What if you could learn how to make a more palatable cocktail?
• What if you could find recipes that lead to more productive days?
• What if you could step back to see the greater picture?

To achieve your goals:

• You need an easy, reliable way to measure your productivity score without added effort.
• You need to tap into a resource bank of objective observations.
• You need to be able to draw quick conclusions about your current practices via default reports and custom queries.

At individual level, employees can enforce some personal rules to become more productive, but these decisions are based on one-time or intuitive observations. At management level, the task of improving processes to drive general productivity is many times a mix and match of gut feeling, years of experience, and panache.

In a nutshell, unless behavior is measured while employees actually work, you would need to collect data manually, over long periods of time, and draw conclusions which are no longer relevant by the time you reach them. But can employees and management afford to add the overhead of daily self-analysis and retrospection? Is it realistic to manually gather behavioral data for months or years on end to actually learn how your organization works?

Microsoft Workplace Analytics does all your productivity measurements for you.

Productivity is the outcome of personal talent and skills balanced with good time management, sensible processes, predictive planning and so on. While talent and skills are hard to capture objectively, things like time, processes, flows, plans can be analyzed to yield aggregate behavioral data.

Microsoft Workplace Analytics can measure and report back behavioral data at micro and macro level by accessing the metadata Office 365 (and Microsoft 365) stores daily.

What’s in it for your organization?

• Avoid paper-based data collection and surveys.
• Analyze your organization’s work distribution and efficiency.
• Manage organizational change management with as little disruption as possible.
• Use shadowing to understand and root out behavior which is not aligned with your business culture.

What’s in it for your employees?

• Analyze your individual work patterns and automate your personal work decisions.
• Manage your time better by eliminating bottlenecks.

Management analytics: Change your processes, adapt your leadership style, and make informed decisions.

Microsoft Workplace Analytics offers management:

• Standard exploration paths backed up by graphs and charts:

  • Week in the life: summary of collaboration, no. of collaboration hours during and after work hours, trends and team distribution

    How is this useful? Enforce new rules and schedules for smoother collaboration to avoid employee burnout.

  • Meetings overview: estimated money volume wasted of low-quality meetings, redundant hours, multitasking hours, conflicting hours

    How is this useful? Reconsider the type of meetings and number of attendees that are necessary to save time and money.

  • Networks and collaboration: network size and levels of influence

    How is this useful? Ensure that the team members are empowered to step up and share their hands-on experience.

• Custom queries that work with different tracks:

  • Organizational metrics: influence score, strong tie score and diverse tie score

    How is this useful? Assess the person’s organizational outreach, access to decision-making circles, and collaboration depth.

  • Person metrics: collaboration/meetings/calls/messages (during vs. after work hours), conflicts, workload created vs. workload received, network size, 1:1 manager engagement, low-quality meeting hours, focus time intervals, workweek span and many more

    How is this useful? Assess whether the person is using their time to bring added value to your organization.

  • Meeting metrics: no. of meeting hours, no. of emails sent during meetings, redundant attendees, meetings cost, redundant hours

    How is this useful? Assess whether meetings act as communication and productivity enablers or as unfocused gatherings.

  • Group-to-Group metrics: invitee vs. attendee count, meeting hours, collaboration hours

    How is this useful? Assess how well the groups are connected and how well they collaborate.

  • Person-to-Group metrics: email count, email hours, collaboration hours, network size

    How is this useful? Assess how well individual get the information they need as part of a group or when reaching out to another group.

How can you set up reports?

1. Go to your Microsoft Workplace Analytics homepage.
2. Configure the settings (analysis, data upload, data sources), exclusions, group sizes.
3. Assign roles to the people in charge of working with the data and the analysis (administrator or analyst).
4. Explore and query OR use your Insights button in Outlook for quick access to weekly or monthly reports.

What’s next?

• Are your teams working extra-hours regularly? Identify and scope out wasted time.
• Are your teams interacting with management occasionally and poorly? Increase the team’s influence span and outreach.
• Are your teams working in silos? Increase cross-team resolution time and give incentives for smooth collaboration.
• Are your teams given enough time to focus? Are there too many low-quality meetings? Redefine processes and schedules.

Employee analytics. Access your behavioral data, book focus time and collaboration time, and don’t miss out.

Microsoft Workplace Analytics offers individuals an automatic weekly and monthly report about:

• Catch up on the unread documents sent to you.
• Follow up or mark as done some requests or questions you sent via email. The system detects the emails you sent which include questions.
• Add your most frequent or important contacts to a list to get reminded of tasks or emails from them.
• Schedule your time by instructing the system to book focus time for your work automatically. Your Microsoft Teams status is marked as “Do not Disturb”. Get your full-concentration work done.
• Analyze your collaboration time : focus time ratio in the form of a graphic and percentage.
• Prepare for your meetings by booking preparation time 30 minutes before the meeting.
• Use the report snippets to easily digest your behavior.

How can you access this report?

• Access Outlook and look for the Insights button. Consult the insight on demand.
• Check your Inbox for the weekly and monthly report preview. Consult the aggregate report and follow up on the intelligent suggestions.

What’s next?

• Self-organize on the fly or the long run.
• Learn and adapt.
• Flag unwanted behavior.

From analytics to knowledge

To change, people need objective evidence: reports, charts, dashboards, and statistics. To change, people need to visualize the crisis or the problem. To change, people need to understand why decisions are made.

Microsoft Workplace Analytics:

• Goal

  • Works silently for you and produces insight that can help you understand how you work individually and as part of a team.

• Mechanics

  • Analyzes the daily data captured by Office 365 to identify patterns that help your organization steer itself to gage more productivity: collaboration among staff, time management, task effectiveness, engagement.
  • Provides regular insight reports for individuals and management.

• Extensibility

  • Can integrate with Microsoft Power BI and other reporting tools for more advanced BI conclusions which sift down to the nitty-gritty details of your business strategies.
  • Can integrate with data sources external to Office 365 and Microsoft 365.

• Outreach

  • Drives changes in your approach to complexity, a layered organization, a meetings culture.
  • Validates individual initiatives and management decisions.
  • Boosts your sales by giving you greater visibility over your organization’s processes.
  • Mediates the benchmarking process of best practices.
  • Models behavior to align your employees with your culture.
  • Accelerates your work.