Microsoft's Workplace Analytics Tool for Office 365 Measures Worker Productivity

Microsoft has released a new tool that will make it easier for managers to analyse worker productivity. Microsoft's Workplace Analytics, is a new organisational analytics solution that's available as an add-on to any Office 365 enterprise plan. The Workplace Analytics add-on offers "behavioural insights" that can be used to improve productivity, workforce effectiveness and employee engagement. Workplace Analytics is available now as an add-on to any Office 365 enterprise plan.

Ryan Fuller, General Manager of Workplace Analytics, explains that the service taps into Office 365 email and calendar metadata, including to/from data, subject lines and timestamps, to offer an idea a light on how the organisation works.

"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 organisation," Fuller explained in an announcement blog post.

For its enterprise users, Microsoft stresses that it enabled Workplace Analytics with built-in privacy and compliance capabilities. This means that Office 365 enterprise customers can decide how to apply insights generated by Workplace Analytics.

"Workplace Analytics only leverages metadata that is aggregated and de-identified," added Fuller.

One of the Fortune 500 companies used Workplace Analytics to identify collaborative patterns of top performers, and then scaled down the behaviour to broader employees which Microsoft claims resulted in a "significant increase in sales."

"We wanted to take a step back and say what if we looked at that concept, but at the organizational level, what would that Fitbit for the organization look like?" Alym Rayani, Director at Microsoft Office 365, told GeekWire. Rayani also revealed some of the testing partners for the new program which include Johnson and Johnson, PayPal, Freddie Mac, and CBRE.