Today on The Weekly Dose I review two of Microsoft’s newest entries into the HR tech space Workplace Analytics (WPA) and MyAnalytics. Both MS Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics are products that can be purchased to use with Microsoft 365.

From a high level what Microsoft does is pull in your data from all the other Microsoft 365 products you use like email, your calendar, activities you do on various other products like Skype, etc. This data is then used to unlock a bunch of stuff around cultural change and transformation.

You can imagine mining this data from your entire employee population would give you insights around how to create more capacity in new ways to work, understand what your best performers are doing to be the best, how certain teams, locations, etc. are collaborating, or not collaborating, etc.

Microsoft Workplace Analytics can then help your organization show where time is being wasted, communication breakdowns, how to increase worker focus time, reduce your amount of meetings, reduce the amount of after-hours work being done, etc.

MyAnalytics can be bought by itself as a stand-alone product for 365 users, but it works great in conjunction with Workplace! It’s the natural offshoot technology for once you have your insights from Workplace you can then help individuals with how can they better manage themselves and their calendars to be more effective and efficient in their work.

What I like about Microsoft Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics: 

– It’s 100% adoption! Your employees don’t have to do anything to gain the value of using Workplace, they just keep doing what they’re doing and the data insights automatically start coming in. Then it’s ‘just’ simple behavior changes!

– Leaders can easily see ways to increase productivity almost instantly after turning it on. Workplace gives you a dashboard that can be drilled down to the team level to show you where your team’s time is being fragmented and help get them more focus time to work better.

– It’s a dynamic tool that is fairly flexible as a BI tool allowing you to bring in other outside data like Sales metrics or employee engagement data, and give you insights on how to best work on increasing the measures that move your business.

– Workplace shows you organizational and team trends around meetings, emails, internal vs. external hours worked, meeting overviews and effectiveness, coaching opportunities, etc. It’s really unbelievable on how one tool touches every person equally in our organization and can have a real impact on moving the culture of an organization on how the leadership wants to define it.

– MyAnalytics is literally like a Fitbit tracker for your workplace. Complete privacy of the individual data. Organizations have zero access to the individual data. “Nudges” the employee to more efficient/effective behaviors based on data. Constantly gives ideas and tips to help them. Shows awesome things like what percentage of your emails were actually opened, reminds them to block time when their calendar begins to get to full with meetings in the future, etc.

When I first started to see this my first thought was “Oh no! Big brother!” but Microsoft has taken real care to ensure this is a product for a positive cultural change, not a hammer for performance management. It’s a technology to aid organizations at a high level, but also give individuals the empowerment to help control their own work lives as well.

Microsoft Workplace Analytics can work with organizations as small as a couple of hundred and still deliver great returns. MyAnalytics can work in teams as small as 3 or 4 and deliver results. It’s easy to see how you would get giant ROI at the enterprise level, but I love that this can be used for organizations of all sizes.

I’m a big advocate that HR should own culture and be the organizational performance driver at a high level. Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics give those leaders in organizations a tool that delivers real insights into how we can begin changing work for the better! Less wasted time in meetings. Less redundant email. Less of all of those things that keep us from being successful. If you’re a Microsoft 365 shop, this is a demo you need your entire leadership team to take a look at!

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.