The Workplace Analytics team is excited to announce our feature updates for May 2021. (You can see past blog articles here). This month’s update describes the following new features:
In response to customer feedback and requests, we are including data from Teams IMs and Teams calls in several collaboration and manager metrics. Queries that use those metrics will now give clearer insights about team collaboration by including this data from Teams. This change will help leaders better understand how collaboration in Microsoft Teams impacts wellbeing and productivity. It’s now possible to analyze, for example, the change in collaboration hours as employees have begun to use Teams more for remote work, or the amount of time that a manager and their direct report spend a Teams chat.
The inclusion of Teams data changes the following metrics, organized by query:
Collaboration hours
Working hours collaboration hours
After hours collaboration hours
Collaboration hours external
Email hours
After hours email hours
Working hours email hours
Generated workload email hours
Call hours
After hours in calls
Working hours in calls
Collaboration hours
Email hours
Collaboration hours
Email hours
For complete descriptions of these and all metrics that are available in Workplace Analytics, see Metric descriptions.
In addition to adding Teams data to the metrics listed in the preceding section, we've made some other improvements to the ways that we calculate metrics, and we’ve added new metric filter options, as described here:
When you and your co-workers perform an organized series of steps to reach a goal, you've participated in a business process. In this feature release, we are providing the ability to analyze business processes -- for example, to measure their cost in time and money. In doing so, we are providing additional analytical capabilities to customers who would like to study aspects such as time spent on particular tasks (such as sales activities or training & coaching activities), the nature of collaboration by geographically diverse teams, branch-office work in response to corporate-office requests, and so on.
For example, your business might conduct an information-security audit from time to time. Your CFO or CIO might want to know whether too little, too much, or just the right amount of time is being spent on these audits, and whether the right roles of employees have been participating in them. You analyze a real-world business processes such as this by running Workplace Analytics meeting or person queries. And now, as you do this, you can use a digital "business process" as a filter. It's these business-process filters that you define in the new business—process analysis feature.
The new business-process analysis feature of Workplace Analytics
For more information about business-process analysis in Workplace Analytics, see Business processes analysis.
We’ve published four new analyst playbooks that introduce advanced analyses with Workplace Analytics and guide you in how to create and implement them. These playbooks will help you with the following use cases:
Each playbook provides a framework for conducting the analysis, sample outputs based on real work, and best practices for success to help you uncover opportunities more quickly and create valuable change. You can access the new playbooks through the Resource playbooks link in the Help menu of Workplace Analytics:
To more clearly highlight the high-value and modern query templates that we offer in Workplace Analytics, we have focused the set of available query templates.
Over the past few years, we’ve released numerous query templates that help you solve new business problems and access rich insights. Unfortunately, so many templates appeared that it became challenging to differentiate them and choose the right one for your task. This month, we have removed some of the templates to make it easier to select and run the latest and greatest templates available.
Don’t worry though; the results of queries that you’ve already run, even from retired templates, will continue to appear on the Results page, and any Power BI templates that you’ve already set up will continue to run as expected.
The new, more focused set of available query templates
For more information about Workplace Analytics queries, see Queries overview.
Microsoft now offers full Workplace Analytics functionality for organizations whose mailboxes are in the Germany Microsoft 365 datacenter geo location. (Workplace Analytics now supports every Microsoft 365 datacenter geo location other than Norway and Brazil, which are expected to gain support soon.) See Environment requirements for more information about Workplace Analytics availability and licensing.
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