Over the past few years you have likely noticed that the way people work is changing. They work more collaboratively, frequently spin up new teams, and need to work anywhere and anytime. You look to Microsoft 365 as the world’s productivity cloud to help support this new culture of work and to enable people to be productive so they can drive business impact. As productivity and technology are intertwined, we also hear that you want to know how your technology is enabling people to be productive and do their best work. To help you on this journey to support this new culture of work, today we are announcing Microsoft Productivity Score.
Productivity Score gives you insights that transform how work gets done. It will provide you visibility into how your organization works, insights that identify where you can enable improved experiences so people can reach their goals, and actions to update skills and systems so everyone can do their best work. Let’s dive into each of these areas in more detail starting with visibility into how your organization works.
Visibility into how your organization works
One of the most noticeable ways we help you see how you are transforming how work gets done is via the score. There are two categories that your score is built from, the employee experience and the technology experience. Both categories include a benchmark that helps you compare how you are doing compared to organizations similar to yours. The employee experience shows how Microsoft 365 is helping to create a productive and engaged workforce by quantifying how people collaborate on content, work from anywhere, understanding communication styles, and developing a meeting culture. The technology experience helps you ensure the technology isn’t getting in the way by assisting you optimize your device experiences such as proactively remediating common helpdesk issues and improving PC startup times, and your network to ensure your apps work well.
Home page of Microsoft Productivity Score with employee experience selected
Visibility into where you are today and how you have progressed is great, but we understand that you are going to want advice on what you could do next and that is where the insights come in.
Insights that identify where you can enable improved experiences
Within employee experience there are three different types of insights. The first is the primary insight which is what you see on the home page and at the top of the details page for an area. What we are measuring in this insight is what will directly impact the score. We also provide academic insights to help you understand the correlation of what we are measuring to productivity. You will see these on the right side of the details page for an area. The final type is a supporting insight which gives you contextual details that drive actionability in support of the primary insight.
Collaborating on content insight details page
Within technology experience there are insights for each area you are attempting to optimize. For example, legacy hardware, poorly tuned policies, or the presence of 3rd party agents can impact PC startup performance. While network performance can impact Teams call quality and OneDrive for Business.
PC startup performance insight in the technology experience page
Now that you understand what your organization could be doing to change how people work, what actions can you take to start that process?
Actions to update skills and systems so everyone can do their best work
To drive change and help people work in new ways there are a few actions you might want to take like raise awareness of a feature or solution, plan training to help people learn how to use a feature, you might need to enable features or services if they are not up and running, or update your configuration to better enable the use of a solution.
To see the actions that you might want to take in the employee experience, you can click on the view actions button in the primary insight or the link at the bottom of a supporting insight. Doing this opens the recommended actions panel with options that you might consider. For example, some of the actions recommended in the collaborating on content area are focused on providing end user training around how to better collaborate and how to create links to documents in emails instead of sending attachments. There is also documentation for IT to understand how to configure external sharing.
Recommended actions for collaborating on content area
Within technology experience, we provide recommended actions like tuning policies, removing problem agents, or upgrading hardware to improve startup performance. Also, to reduce support tickets we provide pre-canned “proactive remediations” to fix issues on devices before people even know there is a problem.
Remediation actions in the technology experience page
Join the private preview
If you would like to see what your score is and help shape the product, you can sign up for the private preview. There will be a preview for the employee experience and one for the technology experience. We are doing this as there are different requirements for each.
For the employee experience, you must have a subscription to an Office 365 commercial plan or Microsoft 365 plan and are in the multi-tenant cloud. For the technology experience you must have at least 50 Intune or co-managed (ConfigMgr managed plus Intune enrolled) Windows 10 devices on version 1903 or higher.
To request access to the private preview please fill out the form at https://aka.ms/productivityscorepreview.
If you join the employee experience preview you will see a Productivity Score entry under reports in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center the week of December 3rd. If you request to join the technology experience preview, we will let you know if you have been accepted by December 3rd.
Update: December 6th, 2019
If you requested access to the employee experience preview on or before November 27th and provided us with valid information you should now see the experience enabled in the Reports section of the left navigation pane within the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. If you submitted your request after November 27th, we will process your request around the 15th of each month.
Please submit feedback on your experience using the “Give Feedback” button in the bottom right of any page within the employee experience.
Thanks for your interest in Productivity Score and we hope you are excited as we are about it. If you have any questions, thoughts, or comments, feel free to leave them in the comments section below.
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