Big Brother Wants to Help!

Microsoft’s Workplace Analytics is a platform for reporting on how your organization is collaborating internally and externally. The system also provides tools to create action plans to help you act on insights gained from the reporting. It’s been around since 2018, but with the current disruptions resulting from the global pandemic, I thought it worth a second look.

The idea and the product look great. It addresses a need that has been around for knowledge organizations for ever. We have implemented a variety of tools for collaboration, but we don’t have data telling us how effectively they are being used. Once we get on that level of understanding we can start to correlate effective collaboration with the effectiveness of our organization.

There are a couple pre-requisites, technical and behavioral needed to take advantage of this system.

You need to be using Office 365. The system relies on the cloud-based exchange implementation to gather email traffic data (headers only).

The system relies on meeting data stored in exchange for many of the reports it creates. This should be taken into consideration, not everyone uses their exchange calendar to record every meeting. It may require making some behavioral changes.

The system is extremely powerful, and I could foresee a strong reaction from professional who view it as too ‘big brother’. Microsoft has anticipated this and offers levels of obfuscation to ensure that individual worker’s details can’t be singled out. Minimum group size, identity obfuscation and access levels are all in place to address the concern that this is a system for big brother too spy on day to day activity.

Finally, this amount of insight may be too much for some organizations. If you have been successful without actual data for the life of your business, and you feel like things are working efficiently, getting a clear picture of what’s going on may be jarring. If it is not broken, why fix it? If this is your first reaction, I would encourage you to consider the possibility that it may be broken, and you don’t know about it. What if you could be much more efficient organization? What if your team could be more satisfied with their work environment? What if your managers all got better at coaching their teams?

Asking and answering these questions is at the core of an agile organization. This is a cultural baseline common in startups and emerging in larger, forward thinking organizations. It will be interesting to see if professional services firms commit to this level of self-examination.