Workplace Analytics May 2021 feature updates
Published May 06 2021 09:51 AM 5,582 Views
Microsoft

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:

 

  • Collaboration metrics with Teams IM and call signals
  • Metric refinements
  • Analyze business processes
  • New business-outcome playbooks
  • More focused set of query templates
  • Workplace Analytics now supports mailboxes in datacenters in Germany

‎Collaboration metrics with Teams IM and call data

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.

 

Changed metrics

The inclusion of Teams data changes the following metrics, organized by query:

 

In Person and Peer analysis queries

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

 

In Person-to-group queries

Collaboration hours

Email hours

 

In Group-to-group queries

Collaboration hours

Email hours

 

For complete descriptions of these and all metrics that are available in Workplace Analytics, see Metric descriptions.

 

Metric refinements

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:

  • Integration of Microsoft Teams chats and calls into metrics - In the past, the Collaboration hours metric simply added email hours and meeting hours together, but in reality, these activities can overlap. Collaboration hours now reflects the total impact of different types of collaboration activity, including emails, meetings, and – as of this release – Teams chats and Teams calls. Collaboration hours now captures more time and activity and adjusts the results so that any overlapping activities are only counted once.
  • Improved outlier handling for Email hours and Call hours - When data about actual received email isn’t available, Workplace Analytics uses logic to impute an approximation of the volume of received mail. We are adjusting this logic to reflect the results of more recent data science efforts to refine these assumptions. Also, we had received reports about measured employees with extremely high measured call hours. This was a result of “runaway calls” where the employee joined a call and forgot to hang up. We have capped call hours to avoid attributing excessive time for these scenarios.
  • Better alignment of working hours and after-hours metrics - Previously, because of limitations attributing certain types of measured activity to specific time of day, after-hours email hours plus Working hours email hours and after-hours collaboration hours plus Working hours collaboration hours did not add up to total Email hours or Collaboration hours. We have improved the algorithms for these calculations to better attribute time for these metrics, resulting in better alignment between working hours and after-hours metrics.
  • New metric filter options - We've added new participant filter options to our email, meeting, chat, and call metrics for Person queries: “Is person’s manager” and “Is person’s direct report.” These new options enable you to filter activity where all, none, or at least one participant includes the measured employee's direct manager or their direct report. You can use these new filters to customize any base metric that measures meeting, email, instant message, or call activity (such as Email hours, Emails sent, Working hours email hours, After hours email hours, Meeting hours, and Meetings).

 

Analyze business processes

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. 

 

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The new business-process analysis feature of Workplace Analytics

 

For more information about business-process analysis in Workplace Analytics, see Business processes analysis.

 

New business-outcome playbooks

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:

  • Boost employee engagement – By joining engagement and pulse survey data with Workplace Analytics data, it’s now easier to uncover insights and opportunities around ways of working, employee wellbeing, manager relationships, and teams and networks.
  • Improve customer focus and sales enablement – Improve the collaboration effectiveness of your salesforce by augmenting Workplace Analytics with CRM data.
  • Enhance operational effectiveness – Identify areas to improve operational effectiveness, including business processes and organizational activity, through process analysis.
  • Take insights to action – Drive behavioral change by using Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics together.

 

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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:

 

Resource-playbooks.png

 

More focused set of query templates

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.

 

andrew-templates.png

The new, more focused set of available query templates

For more information about Workplace Analytics queries, see Queries overview.

 

Workplace Analytics supports mailboxes in the Germany Microsoft 365 datacenter geo location

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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Last update:
‎May 16 2021 10:22 PM
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