Quantifying Personal Productivity Inspires Change Across Microsoft

Page 1 | Quantifying personal productivity inspires change across Microsoft

Quantifying personal productivity
inspireschange across Microsoft

For many companies, their biggestand most importantinvestment is their people. The success of an organization depends on thousands of individual decisions that employees make in a typical day. How does a leader know that employees are making the right choices? How does an employee know? These questions are difficult to answer.

Modern enterprise leaders have the opportunity toaccelerate digital transformation. Technology can help their people become innovative thinkers—and inspire effective and productive decisions.To move quickly, leadersmust grapple with the values, culture, and strategy that drive and accelerate changeand empower individuals.

At Microsoft,MyAnalytics is helping us capitalize on thishuge opportunity to empowerour people. It gives us a powerful tool to enhance our productivity. It’s a win-win—helping to improveboth business outcomes and employee engagement. Microsoft MyAnalytics isarmingour people with quantitative data about their own work habits, practices, and personal networks.

The productivity challenge

Defining productivity is difficult. And ensuring that we harness every tool available to help us do our best work is more important than ever.What seems simple—where to focus employee time—is very complex. Time is money.And many organizations face these challenges:

Individual choices affect the entire organization. People have tooptimize their choices, and time is often the foundation of manydecisions.

Decisions are not always based on data.Many times, work priorities are based on gut feelings and intuition. It can be hard for people to make smart decisions about where to spend their time. As we know in many other areas of business, data-driven decisions can make all the difference.

Bringing productivity into focus at Microsoft

“The most valuable thing we have is our time. And I felt that one of the things that we should make sure we do for ourselves is to give people a sense for how are they spending their time so that they can then be more in control.”
—Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

Like every other company, Microsoft is grappling with digital transformation. We’re creating a thriving and fast-moving digital culture.However, innovation is disruptive, and deciding how to focus our time and talent is getting harder, not easier. Our employees are using MyAnalyticsto help them focus onthe key workplace tasks thatcontribute to culturalchange.

MyAnalytics organizes actionable data about personal productivity into dashboards and gives people clear visibility into two key personal productivity factors—how they spend their time and who they spend it with. Metadata from millions of anonymized emails and meetings generates objective, detailed behavioral key performance indicators (KPIs). Our people get clear data to help them prioritize work and to answer questions like:

• How much time do I spend in meetings?
• What percentage of my emails do I read, and how rapidly do I respond?
• How many of my emails to others are being read?
• How much time do I spend after hours on email and meetings?
• How much time do I have for focused work?

MyAnalyticsprovides insights via an immersive dashboard that displaystime and collaboration data, as well as an embedded experience in Outlook.

At Microsoft, we’re driven by data, and plan to use it for every important decision. For example, we’ve rapidly adopted Microsoft Power BI dashboards to drive our business decisions. MyAnalytics dashboards give our employees personal productivity insights that inform decisions around their own work focus and priorities.

MyAnalytics helps employees conceptualize strategies to work differently in key areas like meetings and focus hours. This personal and actionable datahelps our people work smarter and differently, and advances our cultural change by empowering our employees with the data they need to make more effective productivity decisions.

“Fostering innovation means providing ways to reduce wasted time and create fulfilling work environments. In my experience, when employees are empowered with data to help make decisions that affect their future success, job satisfaction improves, productivity improves, and creativity thrives.”
—Kathleen Hogan, Chief People Manager, Microsoft

Improving collaboration

Our teams are moving at breakneck speed, so it’s no surprise that Microsoft employees look for objective measures to see where they can improve. When it comes to collaboration, MyAnalytics gives usclear insights into our personal networks. We see exactly who we work with the most, and how often we communicate with them. MyAnalytics helps us focus on building key relationships, and to align our time with work priorities.

Collaboration case study

James Turner, for example, is an Account Executive for Microsoft Search Advertising. When James looked at Topcollaborators on his MyAnalyticsNetwork dashboard, he realized that he was working with one account manager about 10 percentas often as other account managers. He knew that he needed to strengthen his relationship with this key team partner. With the data from his personal dashboard in hand, he shared this metricas a conversation starter with theaccount manager. Together they created a roadmap to improve performance and collaboration.Leading the conversation with clear and objective MyAnalytics data built trust into their relationship.

Collaborationtakeaways

Understanding how we work and network is critical.MyAnalytics insights into our networks, email, and meeting activity trends helps us to:

• See who we work with. Top collaboratorsshowswho you spend the most time communicating with, how you collaborate, and provides specific insights into email read and response rates.
• Manage key relationships. Networking and collaboration activity data helpsus focus on building key relationships. For example, reviewing Top collaborators can help our employees prioritize key contacts when reviewing unread emails.
• Take Action. Powerful MyAnalyticsdata lets us closely manage our work relationships, shows us when Responsetime or Read percent are not optimal, and sets the stage for clear follow-up.

Refiningwork-life balance

Constant connectivity and an “always on” culture blur the lines between working and non-working time, and make work-life balance morechallenging tocarve out.We’re using MyAnalytics to help our people prioritize their work,manage their time, and bring more autonomy and control to their lives.

Dashboards help our people plan for the short or long term. The MyAnalytics dashboard lets us set goals andfollow trendsfor data points like After hours meetings andFocus habits, and shows how we’re doing relative to our own goals and our colleagues.

Work-life balance case study

Matt Berg, an Office 365 Solutions Specialist, used to flyextensively for business. He used his downtime in airports to catch up on his work and power through email. Today,Matt’s territory is a single metro area, and he’s behind the wheel of a car all day.There’s no more waiting for airplanes, but also no time between flights to catch up on email.He found himself facing large volumes of email at the end of the day.He suspected that it affected him in a couple of different ways, and his MyAnalytics dashboard backed him up. First, MyAnalytics showed that he was often multitasking in meetings, just to stay caught up on his inbox. Second, his work-life balance was negatively affected by all the email that he had to answer after office hours.

Matt committed to reducing multitasking and to being more present in meetings. He took explicit actions, such as taking more notes in meetings to reduce distraction. He also started blocking more time into his calendar so that he could concentrate onthe work that was bleeding into his personal time. Matt has seen his after hourswork decrease, and he continues to maintain a healthy level of focus hours.

Work-life balance takeaways

It’s a challenge to separate work from leisure time. The MyAnalyticsdashboard view into trends such as multitasking, time spent in meetings, and our focus habits helps us to:

• Harness powerful behavior data. Seeing how much time we’re multitasking in meetings andhaving after hours meetings, recurring meetings, or longer meetings has made usreconsider the cumulative effects of multitasking on our overall effectiveness.
• Inspire practical changes. We’re having shorter meetings and returning time to our colleagues.Having cumulative meeting hoursdata empowers our employees to carefully consider participation and opt out of meetings when appropriate.
• Question assumptions. The Food for thoughtfeature detectstrends and suggests practical solutions, such as “divide and conquer” to get things done more efficiently.
• Inspire honest conversations. Comparing dashboards in regular one-on-one manager meetings—and seeing time spent working on weekends and evenings—is a natural segue to honest and open conversations about work-life balance issues.

Improving communication effectiveness

Email—and lots of it—has been a cultural norm for decades. MyAnalytics helps usmanage the impact of all that email on our time and productivity. Itquickly and intuitively helps people understand the reach of their emails and their relationships with colleagues.

Communication effectiveness case study

Today,ChrisBortlik is a Collaboration Solution Architect. Before that, he was a longtime member ofthe Microsoft field group, and he sent lots of email from home, at night or very early in the morning. When Chris moved to his current role, his email habits didn’t change. Looking at his MyAnalytics dashboard, Chris realizedthat he could communicate more effectively. Hisafter hourstrends were high, and he was sending just as many messages as when he worked in the field. Chrisrealizedthat he was burdening his team by expecting them to respond to messages at any time of day.

Now, he sends most of his messages during businesshours.Chris also used MyAnalytics to recalibrate his email strategy. Noting the Percent read by others, he changed the length and timing of his messages and quickly saw results.

Chris uses other collaboration tools in addition to email. He’s found that it can be much quicker to IM or call someone—responding to verbal cues immediately and makingcourse corrections—rather than to write and respond to emails.

Chris’s larger team lookedacross their dashboards and saw a trend of significant After hours email activity. They created a new norm—that employees should wait until the next day to respond to non-critical emails—giving time back to team members.

Communication takeaways

We want to help our people cut through the clutter and communicate effectively. MyAnalyticsgives us reason to carefully consider how we communicate, and helps us to:

• Re-evaluate communication methods. MyAnalyticsdata—especially email habits—is changingcommunications. We now use Skype for Business and Yammer to collaborate faster and allow people to work from anywhere.
• Create clear policies. MyAnalyticsdashboard data is detailedand consistent for all employees, and it helps us create clear policiesand norms across teams—such as work outside of business hours—that help build a better employee lifestyle.
• Inspire innovation. MyAnalytics dashboards and the MyAnalytics Outlook add-in deliver deep dataon the effectiveness of email, such as the percent of email read by others. This immediate feedback inspires our people to quickly experiment and tailor theircommunications to get more done.

Empowering managers and teams

There’s been a lot of work done to identify traits of great managers—they create trust, focus on strengths, instill accountability, and avoid politics. However, these traits don’t provide much insight into what great managers actually do—how they spend their time every day.

MyAnalyticsdemystifies management behavior, and can help answer questions such as:

• How much time do I spend in one-on-ones with my employees?
• How quickly do I respond to email from my direct reports?
• How large and diverseis mynetwork?

Empowering managers and teams case study

Al Kitchen is an IT manager at Microsoft. He’s keenly interested in fostering work-life balance for his team, and maintaining healthy work relationships is very important to him. With this in mind, he started closely watching his MyAnalytics dashboard data to see where he could make some improvements.

Figure 1.Al’s MyAnalyticsdashboard

Overall, Al is doing well in Focus hours, but Meeting hours, Email hours, and After hours showed that he could use some adjustments.When it comes to After hours activity, Al has a goal of zero hours per week. MyAnalytics showed him that the company average for after hours activity is 2.8 hours per week. Al was trending at 11.7 hours per week, and MyAnalytics showed him the breakdown of daily meetings and email activity.

Clicking into Email hours showed that he was spending more time in email than he’d like—and 40 percent more than the company average. However, it wasn’t clear if the time investment was paying off for his team, as 81 percent of hismessages sent to individuals were read, but only 60 percent of his group emails were.

Figure 2.Al’s Email trends

Al started using his MyAnalytics dashboard data to help him model behavior for his own team. For example, he’s added his direct reports to theImportantpeopleview in Network, which provides ongoing insights.

“I get a zillion emails a day and I can now see when I’m not being as responsive
to my key team membersas they are to me.”
—Al Kitchen, IT Manager

Management takeaways

MyAnalytics delivers consistent, objective, and detailed KPIs that are the same for everyone in the company. Being able to compare your dashboard data with the same data in your direct report’s or manager’s dashboard is powerful, because the same metrics are measured, regardless of role. The data moves us beyond gut feelings, and allows us to verify, act, and follow progress.

It’s always been hard to describe how great managers work. MyAnalytics helps us demystify the behavior of great managers, and gives usthe tools we need to:

• Model effective behavior.Sending mail after hours can set an unrealistic expectation that your employees should work after hours. Reducing multitaskingduringmeetings shows a commitment to focus and to your team.
• Act on relationship data. The You and your manager dashboard component drills into data that is key for maintaining healthy work relationships, such as 1:1 meetings, response times, and email read rates.

• Make concrete changes.After hours dashboard insightsshows how much we work on weekends and evenings, and inspires us to set new group norms and policies for how people worktogether.

Reimagining productivity insights in your organization

Now that we’ve shown you how we use MyAnalytics across Microsoft, imagine what your organization could do.An easyway to envision productivity is to consider time saved around meetings. To demonstrate, imagine anorganization with 100 employees, each witha couple of one-hour recurring weekly meetings. Now, imagine if they only needed 30 minutes to do what was necessary in those meetings. If each person took back an hour each week, that would free 400 hours across the organization—each month—to innovate and bring new ideas to life! What would your organization do with 400 additional hours to innovate every month?

Figure 3. How much time could your organization save each month with MyAnalytics?

Employee empowerment and innovation is top of mind for every enterprise, and enterprise success depends on the multitude of decisions made at all levels of an organization. MyAnalyticsprovides strategic and data-driven personal productivity insightsin a unique and intuitive dashboard format. It helps people re-engage with their work, strategicallychoose how to prioritize their time and energy, and can help to transform the workplace environment. With MyAnalytics, people have a common platform that empowers them to own their own data and focus on high-value outcomes.

For more information

Microsoft IT

microsoft.com/ITShowcase

What is MyAnalytics?

Create better work habits with MyAnalytics (formerly Delve Analytics)

Transforming our digital workplace with Office 365 Enterprise E5

Microsoft Power BI and MyAnalytics drive executive effectiveness

© 2017 Microsoft Corporation. This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

IT Showcase Article

microsoft.com/itshowcaseApril 2017