Microsoft’s tool can help with efficiency.
Microsoft has made its MyAnalytics tool available to more users, helping people to improve productivity and to gain a better work/life balance.
Previously only available to users on an Enterprise E5 plan or as an add-on to E1 and E3 plans, MyAnalytics is now available to all Office365 users and Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Business suites that include Exchange Online. If you’ve never used the tool before, then, you or your staff can now use it to improve how you work.
So what exactly is MyAnalytics? As the name would suggest, it’s a tool that provides analysis of a user’s personal working patterns. It does so by collating data from everyday work that can then be used to diagnose and potentially fix problem areas of productivity, employee engagement and other efficiencies. By addressing possible areas of improvement, MyAnalytics can ultimately suggest ways of working smarter which could then impact on a company’s overall productivity - Microsoft itself has described the tool as a “fitness tracker for work”.
key analytical data. So, data such as the number of hours spent in meetings or time spend reading and sending emails are presented in an at-a-glance format. MyAnalytics can also show you how many uninterrupted hours you spend on particular tasks and, importantly, how many working hours are being spent outside of core business hours.
MyAnalytics collates its data from a user’s mailbox plus data from Skype for Business chats and calls, and automates its calculations based on data that a user could in theory obtain themselves by looking at the relevant metadata. As that’s quite a laborious process, MyAnalytics does all the running for you and it doesn’t place any tracking software on your system in doing so. The data is private - neither a system admin nor a manager can view it - and new insights from Microsoft Teams and signals from documents saved on OneDrive and SharePoint are further being added this month.
The benefits, then, are many. For starters, the General Manager of Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics at Microsoft wrote in a blog post of the problem of burnout, citing factors such as the increased pace of work, an increase in collaborative working, online chats and meetings, and the blurring of lines between work and life. The theory is that MyAnalytics can help business users to take control over areas of their work that they can now easily identify as less productive and act accordingly. A key factor in this is meeting time, targeted by the tool as an area where users can save hours by cutting down on low-quality meetings.
By better recognising hours spent outside of regular business hours, users can also address after-hours working that might have become the norm. In reducing these hours and looking at ways of working more efficiently, employees can improve their own work/life balance, which should lead to fewer instances of burnout and a happier, more productive workforce.
Also on more efficient working, MyAnalytics will help users to identify how distractions are impacting on their working patterns and to focus on prioritising the more important projects.
No tool can suddenly make us more efficient workers, of course, but MyAnalytics can certainly provide users with an insight into their working patterns and act as a starting point for a more productive future.