Accurate tracking and analysis of your company’s and your employees’ productivity is an essential component to continued growth and success. Otherwise, you would have no idea what’s working and what’s not.
Do you have a reliable method to track this data? Do you know if your employees are using their tools as effectively as possible? Do you know if they are aware of and implementing Best Practices?
These are among the questions that all managers and executives should ponder. Even if you are monitoring an in-office or remote workforce, you cannot accurately grade productivity simply by looking at peripheral data - their clock-in and clock-out times, for example. You must know how effective they are when they are on the clock.
It really doesn’t matter where the employee is – in the office or on ‘work from home’ status. In today’s hybrid work environment, the value and work product an employee brings is the best gauge. It is not merely an issue of judging their productivity – a smart manager looks at what may be hindering employees from doing their best work and making the most of their time.
Learning curves are not the most popular things among employees, especially when they are associated with new, unfamiliar technology. New tools often slow the work down at first, so many employees do a ‘go-around’ by doing things the way they have always done them. This may be momentarily comfortable, but the employee is ultimately losing out on a better, faster way to work.
Productivity is a very nuanced area to understand and address. Invading the privacy of work from home employees by tracking their every keystroke would be time-consuming, pointless, and counterproductive in providing a boost to positive forward motion. Plus, employees resent being spied on, and resentment can grow in nefarious ways.
What’s the answer?
If your company uses Microsoft 365 then you already have a tool at your fingertips that you can use to find nuggets of productivity gold. This tool is the Microsoft Productivity Score (MPS) - aka the Microsoft Adoption Score, a very valuable tool if you use Microsoft Teams.
How do Microsoft Teams measure productivity?
Microsoft Productivity Score assesses data from multiple M365 apps, but paramount is the data from Teams because it is the primary operations app. It is both a holistic and modular approach since it examines core areas of your employees’ workflow, looking at employees and departments as both separate units and as parts of the whole enterprise. Since the entire organism is being evaluated, no employee should feel that they are being singled out.
MPS provides data-driven insights that you can evaluate and share with your staff. Managed and communicated effectively, these insights will help to boost their performance. Hardware-related tools are also included, allowing for a better determination as to whether your company tools are a help or a hindrance.
MPS is based on eight categories, with a possible score of 100 points each, therefore the highest overall score is 800. These are the key areas.
People Experiences
This area examines how people go about their work. Are they using best practices for collaboration and other activities? Are they doing things the hard way, which slows the work process down? Do meetings run long for no good reason? If everyone is working in the cloud, are employees using shared cloud storage links or are they still emailing attachments instead?
Here’s one valuable ‘people’ insight: Every employee can save an average of 100 minutes per week by using online files for collaborating with fellow team members. The MPS can show you how your team measures up in this aspect, and many other metrics.
100 minutes per week is equal to approximately 86.6 hours per year. That’s over 2 full workweeks!
The subcategories within the people experience category are:
- Communication
- Content collaboration
- Mobility
- Meetings
- Teamwork
Technology Experiences
This area examines the health and performance of your devices. Are hardware and software on endpoints causing issues? Is it slowing down the workflow? Are there network connectivity problems? Are all apps updated as they are supposed to be?
This category will look at and identify any risk areas within the technology that your team relies on. Any technology that is not secure or functioning well can slow your business down.
These three are subcategories in the technology experiences area:
- Endpoint analytics (Intune can check this)
- Network connectivity
- Microsoft 365 apps health
Special Reports
This category provides insights and details on business continuity.
This can show you how employee collaboration and other activities are evolving, especially when your company goes through transitions. One such transition has been from an office-based to a home-based workforce and back again to in-office or hybrid work. This report will lay out how these changes have impacted your workers’ productivity.
How Microsoft Productivity Score Helps Your Company
Tracks Metrics Automatically
Microsoft Productivity Score automatically tracks your team’s use of Microsoft 365 applications. This provides you with helpful information on how your employees use their digital tools.
These metrics give you a great overview of whether employees are using best practices. Often, they simply need guidance to learn a more efficient way of performing work tasks.
Insights to Understand the Data
Data, findings, and reports won’t do you any good if they look like Greek to you. This will give you insights on how to understand and interpret the data. You won’t get just the metrics, but the context as well. Once you use this to educate yourself, you can educate your employees on things that save time and improve workflow.
For example, a quick response to a question saves time. Using @mentions (i.e., @Joe Smith) can help achieve that by alerting the key person whose input you desire, rather than waiting for the entire team to read it. MPS will show you how many people use @mentions in team communications, and how much this increases the response rate.
Recommended Actions
What do you do with all this information? That’s the third piece of guidance you gain. MPS will provide actionable recommendations designed to improve specific metrics. This helps you to improve productivity.
The combination of the metric, insight, and recommendations make MPS a comprehensive tool.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Microsoft measure employee performance?
A: Microsoft gives a score based on activity, how people collaborate, on content, how they use Microsoft 365 products to communicate, and whether they use it across multiple platforms.
How many organizations use Microsoft teams?
A: Microsoft’s most recent figures state that over one million organizations use teams, including 91 of the Fortune 100 companies.
Can Microsoft Teams monitor employees?
A: Yes. Administration can use Teams to monitor just about everything employees do – but only in Teams itself. It cannot monitor non-Microsoft apps.
What is Microsoft adoption hub?
A: The adoption hub is a third party app which modifies the MS Teams app. It leverages Teams as a platform to quickly ramp-up end users on various technology platforms.
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