Microsoft Workplace Analytics

SoftwareMicrosoft Workplace Analytics

Microsoft Just released a new monitoring tool, that allows company leaders to see how teams within their organization spend their time.
The brand-new program, Microsoft Workplace Analytics is available for purchase as an add-on to the Office 365 Enterprise plans. According to the director of Microsoft Office 365, Alymn Rayani, ” the new program is something similar to Fitbit for work productivity”. The new add-on program uses metadata that are released from office 365 programs such as Outlook, and calculate variables such as meeting time, time spent in email, and how frequently people work after hours.

Microsoft authorized a study by Forrester, the research company that saw several executives see rising employee productivity as a top importance of organization in the coming year. As stated in the study, a lot of organization require the tools and knowledge to decipher and apply data to enhance the workplace.
However, some people think this stage of observing team work habits is a little intrusive, although Microsoft foresee the program as an aid for companies to figure out how their employees can be happier than making them more productive.

For instance, a company can look at the number of hours teams spend on working outside the regular time for business and decide if it requires to make a change to keep their teams from overworking. On the other hand, it may be that employees are spending so much of their time in meetings, which can obstruct their productivity.

Workplace Analytics allows custom query capability, which in turn can let leaders of organizations look at any number of metrics to determine how to run a company. Microsoft has been testing the program with several of its beta customers like Freddie Mac, CBRE, PayPal and Johnson & Johnson.

The real estate giant CBRE used the tool to analyze the metadata connected to employee calendar items, to observe the travel period for meetings. CBRE found travel time to meetings dropped for about 1,200 employees after a relocation, which in turn saved the company about 100 hours per week.

Sources: GeekWire, Techmeme