Do you know how productive your employees are?
Research¹ suggests employees are less productive than they used to be. Many are spending more time with emails and meetings than doing other uninterrupted work. How does your organisation stack up? Would you like to know which activities are performed by different departments during work hours and set up goals to change them? Now you can.
Microsoft Workplace Analytics
Microsoft Workplace Analytics is a powerful new organisational analytics solution that is a free add-on available with any Office 365 enterprise plan. The basic idea behind Workspace Analytics is simple. There are certain activities that we all do throughout our workday; we send e-mails, attend meetings and collaborate on projects. Many of these activities either take place within Office 365, or they are scheduled through Office 365. In either of these cases, it is possible to gain a wealth of insight into how a user spends their day just by analysing that user’s Office 365 activities. This information was available to admin users of Office 365 but it is now accessible to decision makers in a format that makes it actionable.
For example, you can tell how much time a user spent in meetings, how much time was spent answering e-mail and how many different people a user communicated with over the course of a day. You can even gain insights into who a user is communicating with to get their job done.
Insights
Workplace Analytics taps into Office 365 email and calendar metadata, including to/from data, subject lines and timestamps, to shine a light on how the organisation collaborates and spends time. It turns this digital exhaust—the data that comes naturally from our everyday work—into a set of behavioural metrics that can be used to understand what’s going on in an organisation.
Security
Microsoft has enabled Workplace Analytics with built-in privacy and compliance capabilities. Customers own their Office 365 data and decide how to apply insights generated by Workplace Analytics to solve tough business challenges.
Custom Queries
Every organisation has unique business questions and problems to solve. Data analysts at Telefónica Tech can help you choose from a unique set of collaboration metrics to explore activities and trends within the business, including time spent in email, time in meetings, after-hours time and network size. Our analysts can also create custom queries and filter to aggregated population subsets including regions, roles and functions.
Office 365 MyAnalytics
The MyAnalytics personal dashboard is an employee tool that goes hand in hand with Workplace Analytics. It helps you understand how much time you spend in meetings and email. It also shows you how many uninterrupted hours you spend focusing on key tasks, which colleagues you spend the most time working with, and how much time you work outside business hours.
Setting goals
Many information workers spend over 80%¹ of their time sitting in meetings and sending emails, leaving little time to get other tasks done during the work day. With MyAnalytics, you can set goals for reducing unproductive collaboration hours and track your progress over time.
Microsoft suggests using both tools, to track behaviours at an organisational level and to empower employees to work on their own goals. A simple 3 step approach can be applied to drive value and productivity improvements across your organisation. This model should be seen as a repeating process that is ongoing.
- Identify trends and areas of improvement using Workplace Analytics
- Set goals across the company and roll out via people managers to employees providing them with MyAnalytics to track their own behaviour
- Measure the results at a department level using Workplace Analytics.
What will employees think?
The first thing anyone thinks when they hear of this capability is Big Brother is watching and they get a bit uncomfortable. Managing this expectation is important to ensure the impact remains positive. The message has to be around making peoples life easier and making the department better. Minimising its use as a tool for monitoring individual behaviour and more about driving culture and values at a department or even organisation level.
If you’d like to learn more about Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics and how to use in your organisation, just get in touch.