Wouldn’t it be great to have insights into how productive your team is being? You could check how often they’re using certain tools to make better decisions about business investments or examine which employees you need to engage more effectively.
Microsoft Productivity Score is one of the more recent and controversial arrivals in the Microsoft ecosystem. Aiming to provide visibility into your employees’ experience so you can improve efficiency and empowerment in the workforce, the score is sure to appeal to plenty of business leaders.
However, the response to the arrival of Productivity Score has been mixed. Many misinformation ended up online, with disgruntled users complaining that the scoring system was akin to “workplace surveillance”. But is Microsoft’s new feature really a “Big Brother” functionality?
What is Microsoft Productivity Score
Microsoft Productivity Score is all about giving businesses “insights” into where they are on their digital transformation journey. According to Microsoft, the score aims to show you how much your employees are really using various tools, and how you can work to improve team experience.
The Productivity Score uses metrics, insights, and recommended actions designed to support companies in generating better results from their teams. Primarily, Productivity Score focuses on people experiences, technology experiences, and “special reports”.
Your overall productivity score is based on the combined score of your people and technology experience categories, with the highest potential score falling at 800.
So, what’s the problem?
The people who don’t like the idea of the Productivity Score see it as an invasion of privacy, or a workplace surveillance scheme intended to keep employees in line. However, many of the experts who have called Microsoft out for this feature are supporters of similar functionality elsewhere.
Microsoft argues that the Productivity Score was never intended as an employee monitoring tool. However, even if it were, it wouldn’t be the first system out there to offer this functionality. There are plenty of companies that want the option to keep track of how productive and effective their staff members are being. Products like Controlio and ActivTrak are a testament to this.
What Does Microsoft Productivity Score Really Do?
The reality is that Microsoft Productivity Score offers a very similar experience to the reporting capabilities on other marketplace tools like Zoom, Cisco, and Slack. Many collaboration and communication tools allow for adoption and user-level reporting.
To reduce the risk of issues caused by “invasion of privacy”, Microsoft even actively removed some of the features and tracking options that employees might have found worrisome. Today, the Productivity Score tool focuses on:
People Experiences
This reporting segment aims to show how the organisation might be using Microsoft tools to transform their work in collaboration, communication, and meetings. There are five measurement categories here, including:
- Communication: How people share information through chat, email, community posts, and other tools for a unified employee experience
- Content collaboration: How people within the organisation create and collaborate on content in the cloud, wherever they are
- Mobility: How easy it is for team members to access and use files from the Microsoft 365 ecosystem to continue making progress on projects
- Meetings: How the organisation can leverage meeting best practices to improve meeting quality
- Teamwork: How the people in an organisation are using shared environments like Microsoft Teams and SharePoint for collaborative success
Technology Experiences
