Fine-tune your business (and weed out dud employees) with Microsoft's new Workplace Analytics...

[Shawn Knight]

Nobody is going to dedicate as much time and effort towards the success of a business as its owner. That doesn’t mean, however, that the average employee isn’t expected to pull their own weight.

Given the connected nature of today’s on-demand, instant gratification society, staying focused at work can be a real chore – even for good, honest people. After all, if you’re on the clock and not being productive, that’s called stealing.

It’s this issue and others that Microsoft’s latest Office 365 add-on aims to address.

Microsoft Workplace Analytics is a powerful organizational analytics solution that provides managers and other higher-ups with behavioral insights that can be used to boost productivity, employee engagement and workforce effectiveness.

As Workplace Analytics General Manager Ryan Fuller explains, the tool taps into Office 365 calendar and e-mail metadata such as subject lines, timestamps and to/from data – cleverly called digital exhaust – to gauge how an organization collaborates and spends time.

Fuller says Microsoft designed Workplace Analytics with built-in privacy and compliance features, pointing out that it only leverages metadata that is aggregated and de-identified. Furthermore, customers own their Office 365 data and can decide how to apply the insights generated by the tool.

The add-on isn’t just about weeding out dud employees or hopelessly trying to motivate those with zero drive. Analysts can use the tool to see how much time is spent working on e-mail or in meetings and even determine the size of an employee’s internal network.

For example, managers can use the tool to study the behaviors of top-performing salespeople and scale those techniques across the entire sales department. Similarly, an organization can look at the effects of 1:1 meetings between employees and leadership to gauge whether investments of time are paying off. Elsewhere, HR teams could determine if relocation would save on travel time by analyzing calendar metadata from booked meetings.

Even Microsoft is using the new tool internally. Kathleen Hogan, chief people officer at Microsoft, said their HR Business Insights group is using Workplace Analytics across a variety of initiatives—from understanding the behaviors driving increased employee engagement to identifying the qualities of top-performing managers who are leading Microsoft’s cultural transformation from within. Hogan added that they believe people analytics is a competitive necessity for any HR team.

As rings true with many aspects of our lives (think finances, relationships, diet, etc.), simply paying attention to what’s going on can save time and money like you wouldn’t believe. There's little reason to believe that fine-tuning a business with a tool like this wouldn't pay dividends.

Microsoft’s new Workplace Analytics tool is available as an add-on to any Office 365 enterprise plan.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/70015-fine-tune-business-weed-out-dud-employees-microsoft.html

 

[dbracer]

Company I work for is a large office 365 org.

Hint received. Stop browsing techspot on work pc. Switch to personal cell for all time wasting activities.

Thanks for heads up haha.

 

[DelJo63]

OH BOY! George Orwell: 1984 & Animal House. Finally the HR Dept can prove your lack of productivity :sigh:

 

[Uncle Al]

LOL ..... if a company needs a special software program to figure out who the "duds" are, perhaps the company also needs to close it's doors as well!

 

[Steed]

"Fuller says Microsoft designed Workplace Analytics with built-in privacy and compliance features, pointing out that it only leverages metadata that is aggregated and de-identified."

"For example, managers can use the tool to study the behaviors of top-performing salespeople and scale those techniques across the entire sales department."

Contradictory statements alert. Just how do you keep things anonymous while tracking the behaviours of specific salespeople ? Even the headline is misleading ... how can you identify a "dud" employee if all your data is anonymized so as to not specifically identify anyone ? It all sounds a bit fudged to me.

 

[Kibaruk]

"Fuller says Microsoft designed Workplace Analytics with built-in privacy and compliance features, pointing out that it only leverages metadata that is aggregated and de-identified."

"For example, managers can use the tool to study the behaviors of top-performing salespeople and scale those techniques across the entire sales department."

Contradictory statements alert. Just how do you keep things anonymous while tracking the behaviours of specific salespeople ? Even the headline is misleading ... how can you identify a "dud" employee if all your data is anonymized so as to not specifically identify anyone ? It all sounds a bit fudged to me.

You don't need to know who your top performing salespeople are to actually have top performing salespeople data. It's like... getting the stats of a race, how many finished in 1 minute, then you take that number, and you start dissecting it, like... from that group, the fastest one had X motor and Y wheels, so your manager says let's put Y wheels in every car and let's see how it goes from there, then you can actually measure if that group of Y wheeled cars are actually making an improvement or not by comparing the data from last week and so on... everything while being de-identified.

 

[gcarter]

The problem with this "big brother" approach to productivity monitoring is essentially it harbours the "bean counter" mentality! Or to put it another way "quantity over quality"

I work for a large company, who employ similar monitoring tools and the people who receive "all the praise" are the offshore teams who follow process to the letter, and the rest of us, are left to clean up the mess of hurried work, because of this "bean counter" mentality.

Needless to say, this does not equate to an efficient business strategy, rewarding and monitoring staff in this fashion

 

[captaincranky]

"Fuller says Microsoft designed Workplace Analytics with built-in privacy and compliance features, pointing out that it only leverages metadata that is aggregated and de-identified."

"For example, managers can use the tool to study the behaviors of top-performing salespeople and scale those techniques across the entire sales department."

Contradictory statements alert. Just how do you keep things anonymous while tracking the behaviours of specific salespeople ? Even the headline is misleading ... how can you identify a "dud" employee if all your data is anonymized so as to not specifically identify anyone ? It all sounds a bit fudged to me.

Well, the statements appear to be contradictory, yet they are and they aren't...

You could argue the program knows how the top salesmen operate without knowing who they are. Yet it's almost impossible to take the human component out of a sales transaction, particularly one that requires interactive technical knowledge, in addition to the skills and personality necessary to be "a closer".

OTOH, You probably read the "fine print" too closely, since the two statements could be intentionally misleading. :wink: :wink:

In other words, you tell the "duds" the program can't track them, they assume they're in the clear, after which they go back to downloading porn and checking their Facebook statuses most of the workday. Next Friday rolls around and they find termination notices in their paychecks, while still rigidly clinging to the belief it couldn't be the machine which did them in. After all, they're much smarter than any computer program, they have the power of reason, and maybe a thousand followers...(y).

What would be truly spiteful, in a humane sort of way, (<note the duplicity there), would be if M$ were to tweak the program to deliver a "complimentary" resume with each firing. That way, the newly jobless, could easily slide into another job with the competition, thereby hosing that operation in the process..

To paraphrase the legendary Sun Tzu, "The enemy of my company is my friend, when he or she is screwing over my competition".

 

[captaincranky]

OH BOY! George Orwell: 1984 & Animal House. Finally the HR Dept can prove your lack of productivity :sigh:

You realize of course, your post was "crime think", in and of itself...?

And I know it's a threadbare internet meme, but all there is left to do, is tie "the cloud" to armed satellites, and "Skynet" is born.

 

[PaulineGreening]

Whoah, just reading the headline and I already am all for this. This would help management see the numbers. I'm liking it so far.

 

[DelJo63]

I work for a large company, who employ similar monitoring tools and the people who receive "all the praise" are the offshore teams who follow process to the letter, and the rest of us, are left to clean up the mess of hurried work, because of this "bean counter" mentality.

W a y B a c K - when, I worked for BIG BLUE and eventually they went for a peer-ranking system for reviews; Team members rank ordered their personal evaluations of one another; YUCK. Best buddies kiss-up politics at its worst. This was detrimental to teamwork and sharing as to do so did not enhance your ranking. Very sad to see major companies using draconian techniques.