Productivity is a balanced combination of intelligent planning and focused efforts or in simple words, getting more things done in less time. Every workplace, howsoever large or small is largely driven by efficiency which manifests itself into productivity at a later stage. Lower or insufficient efficiency levels is bound to affect the business and jeopardize its sustainability and survival. Tools such as Microsoft Workplace Analytics can help managers understand and improve worker productivity.

Microsoft Workplace Analytics Productivity Tool

Microsoft Workplace Analytics is an employee productivity tool that is capable of providing a wealth of information that companies can use to understand their workers better. The data is generated via Microsoft Graph and is based on employees working patterns.

It taps into Office 365 data (email and calendar metadata) that comes from our everyday work. The data collected can be used to yield unique insights into resource allocation, collaboration behaviors and organizational networks to understand the organization’s needs. Bear in mind; the tool simply leverages metadata that is aggregated and de-identified. In addition to the above, Workplace Analytics supports built-in privacy and compliance capabilities.

The new offering from Microsoft covers a wide range of organizational based initiatives like:

1] Building a Digital, Data-driven Enterprise

The single most crucial factor in building a true, digital and robust data-driven enterprise is connectivity. Microsoft Workplace Analytics addresses this issue by assuring uninterrupted connectivity across everything—people, processes, data, and systems.

2] Manager effectiveness

Behaviors of managers are pivotal in determining employee engagement and retention. Such abstract qualities can be readily measured by Workplace Analytics. It can identify the qualities of top-performing managers who are leading the company’s cultural transformation and helping it grow. The top leadership after identifying these traits can use them to drive a cultural change with managers in other departments of the organization. This can help boost overall productivity.

3] Sales productivity

Insights gained from Workplace Analytics could be used to identify the collaborative patterns of top performers in a workplace and then try to replicate the same in the organization—resulting in a significant increase in productivity. Some of these insights were expected, like the amount of time spent with customers.

4] Customized queries

Every organization has its own target customers so; the desired digital application should have the ability to yield insights on activities and trends within the business, including time spent in email, time in meetings, after-hours time and network size. The Microsoft product does this all. It can create custom queries and filter to aggregated population subsets including regions, roles, and functions.

You can learn more about it on Office.com.