The Workplace Analytics team is excited to announce our feature updates for May 2020. (You can see past blog articles here). This month’s update covers our latest features:
You can now use the Power BI connector to access the results of Workplace Analytics person and meeting queries in Power BI.
When you use the connector, all sensitive, raw data stays within Workplace Analytics and is never accessible within Power BI. The connector also automatically enforces your minimum group size settings in Power BI, further helping to maintain employee privacy.
After you’ve set up the connection, you can build visualizations, set up data refresh, and confidently share dashboards with your organization, knowing that the sensitive, raw data cannot be accessed by your audience.
To use the connector
For complete steps and more information, see Connect through the Power BI Connector.
In Workplace Analytics, managers can now obtain actionable insights about their teams, insights that are based on expert, industry research. They can see how the team is currently getting work done and get suggestions on maintaining employee engagement, improving team collaboration, and increasing organizational agility.
On the manager dashboard, they will find insights into collaboration norms that affect employee experience and team effectiveness:
To see insights
Role: group manager
Before you can experience insights, a Workplace Analytics admin must first enable them. On the Manager settings page, Workplace Analytics admins can allow specific managers – or all managers who’ve been assigned Workplace Analytics licenses – to aggregate collaboration insights about their team and to start plans for their team in Workplace Analytics.
To configure manager settings
Note that only managers who have been assigned a Workplace Analytics license and whose team meets or exceeds the Minimum team size setting can access Workplace Analytics.
Role: Workplace Analytics admin
Microsoft is serious about protecting individual privacy. Privacy can always be guaranteed if no information is revealed, which is not very useful. Similarly, making all information available can lead to high-fidelity metrics but can compromise individual privacy.
Differential privacy, which offers a balance between providing useful information and protecting individual privacy, is now available – in the new Insights for people managers feature of Workplace Analytics.
In the results for person queries, the reporting for the working hours, after hours, and focus hours metrics is influenced by the working hours that individuals have set in Outlook. This can cause calculation errors if they have set unusually long working hours. To avoid this problem, analysts can standardize the working hours that a query uses to calculate these metrics.
In the Dependencies section of a person query, analysts can set the working days and hours that a query will use in its calculations:
This lets analysts benchmark metrics calculations by using one standard set of values for working hours and days, with the goal of achieving apples-to-apples comparisons. The settings that analysts make are used only within the query and its calculations. They do not override any data that is used in any other queries or in any user's settings in Outlook or elsewhere.
The output of person queries will automatically contain information that pertains to these standardized settings:
Admins regularly upload files that contain organizational data. While performing the upload steps, they can make choices that render unavailable one or more data attributes (columns of data) that were present in previously uploaded data. When this happens, if an auto-refresh query uses a data column that is no longer available, Workplace Analytics turns off the auto-refresh option for this query.
If either of these situations arises, Workplace Analytics notifies analysts in various ways:
As an analyst, you can then change the affected auto-refresh queries to run them again or access the results of the query's most recent completed run. In many cases, you can still manually run the queries for which auto-refresh has been turned off, but if columns are missing, the query's results will not contain the attributes that were removed.
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