Workplace Analytics turns data that comes naturally from our everyday work into a set of behavioural metrics.
Microsoft has launched a new organizational analytics tool, Workplace Analytics, to measure and analyse workers’ productivity. This new tool is available as add-on to the Office 365 enterprise users.
The new tool leverages Office 365 collaboration data to extract powerful behavioural insights, which organizations can use to improve productivity, employee engagement and workforce effectiveness. The collaboration pattern across organizations can be understood in a better way to make better business decisions.
It provides real time actionable insights to business leaders.
The tool extracts data from Office 365, like email and calendar meta data, to and from data, subject lines and timestamps to provide insight on how the organization works.
Leaders can check how the organization spends time and collaborates internally and externally with unprecedented insights from Office 365. These actionable insights can be used by leaders to inform a variety of strategic decisions in a network — they can allocate resources and plan workspace.
Ryan Fuller, general manager, Workplace Analytics, explains, “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 organization.”
The tool comes with privacy controls and compliance capabilities, so as to protect data. The users can decide which population to analyse and maintain control over data aggregation and de-identification standards.
Fuller adds, “Workplace Analytics only leverages metadata that is aggregated and de-identified.”
Using this tool, organizations can establish best practices, predictive models and make a benchmark. Also, one can find the potential problem areas and decide upon the hiring strategies, new organizational structure and business programmes.
According to Microsoft, one of the Fortune 500 companies used this new Workplace Analytics tool to identify collaborative patterns of top performers and then applied the behaviour to broader employees, which resulted in a significant increase in sales.
Some of the other companies trying this new tool are Johnson & Johnson, Paypal, Freddie Mac and CBRE.