What is Workplace Analytics?
Workplace Analytics, a new tool/add-on now integrated into Office 365 Enterprise, enables business leaders to better understand their employees’ productivity.
The tool is an extension of MyAnalytics, a feature of VoloMetrix, a start-up acquired by Microsoft in 2015 whose tools were designed to help companies quantify the effectiveness of their employees.
A recent study by Forrester shows that improving employee productivity is the top priority for executives over the next year. According to Ryan Fuller, Head of Workplace Analytics, the tool provides unprecedented behavioral data that can be used to increase employee productivity, efficiency and engagement.(source)
How does Workplace Analytics work?
Workplace Analytics uses existing communication and collaboration data from other Office 365 programs (email, calendar, appointments, forms) to measure indicators such as time dedicated to email, meeting time, time spent in the office outside working hours.
More concretely, Workplace Analytics analyzes the metadata present in Office 365 email and calendar, including data to/from, email subjects, time stamps to provide more information on how the organization collaborates and spends its time.
Aggregated and de-identified metadata
The head of Workplace Analytics, Ryan Fuller, insists in the aforementioned article that this data is aggregated and de-identified.
The tool has built-in privacy and compliance features, with customers owning their Office 365 data and having the ability to decide how to apply the data generated by Workplace Analytics with the aim of solving important organizational issues.
How do I use Workplace Analytics?
You can use available templates to track scenarios such as company performance and sales force effectiveness.
You can set up performance indices, model best practices for your organization and measure progress.
You can customize the tool according to your priorities, targeting specific scenarios and queries.
Based on the premise that every organization has unique needs and questions, the tool lets you create customized queries directly within Workplace Analytics.
Analysts can explore the organization’s activities and trends (time spent on e-mail, time spent in meetings, time spent in the office outside working hours, network size) by choosing from a unique set of collaboration parameters.
They can also create customized queries and filter by region, role and function within the organization.
Increase sales force productivity
One of the examples cited by Ryan Fuller in his article highlights the increase in sales thanks to the use of Workplace Analytics.
The sales department of a Fortune 500 company used Workplace Analytics to identify the best-performing salespeople’s collaborative models, then applied them throughout the department.
The result?
A sharp increase in sales.
Some of the data generated by Workplace Analytics were obvious, such as time spent with customers.
Others, such as the size of the internal network of top-performing salespeople, were new, and indicated the salesperson’s ability to get answers and solve customer problems.
