The past ten months have been defined by change. Organizations have had to reshape how they work, employees have had to explore digital frontiers with remote working toolsets, and markets have had to reinvent value propositions and offerings in order to compete against lockdowns and regulations. The virus has thrust people into digital workplaces powered by Microsoft, Teams, collaboration tools, video conferencing systems, and email platforms. Home is now where the To Do list is.
And few organizations were fully prepared for the change that remote working has brought, or the value that new ways of working have wrought. In fact, few understand exactly what they’ve achieved over the past few months as they’ve been too busy bailing water to invest into solutions such as Microsoft Workplace Analytics that can help them refine processes and assess the health of those who work within the business. Workplace Analytics is a powerful data set that allows for the business to unpack the extraordinary from the every day and the mundane. It opens windows into office spaces, behaviours, usage trends, customer feedback, and patterns that reveal new opportunities and better ways of working.
Work smarter with workplace analytics
Microsoft Workplace Analytics is designed to pull together all the threads that filter through the world of work. From Teams to email to workflows to SharePoint to the multiple features and programs that comprise the Microsoft Office 365 suite, Microsoft Workplace Analytics helps companies unpack efficiencies, change systems that don’t work and make life more effective.
It’s intelligent analytics that helps simplify a world defined by uncertainty and complexity.
Microsoft Workplace Analytics helps the business to work more intelligently. It does so by sifting through the data created by employees working within the system and uses the insights it produces to help decision makers prioritize specific behaviors or increase the effectiveness of certain systems. The data highlights the silos that aren’t working optimally and the systems that are perhaps too convoluted or complicated to fully capture employee engagement.
By identifying patterns in the every day, the solution helps the business to intelligently manage the problems that may have cropped up during the move to remote working, and the move back ton the office. By identifying particular patterns, the business can remove obstacles to engagement and streamline productivity which has the knock-on benefit of making life a lot easier for the employee.
The benefits behind analytics tools
The solution that the organization implements to better understand its people and processes doesn’t have to be Microsoft Workplace Analytics. There are several different options available on the market. However, these are the benefits that every business should be enjoying from their workplace analytics solution:
- Actionable insights that can be used to make a tangible difference to business and budget. A step up and to the left of standard insights, these actionable insights can help your business make decisions that are more intelligent, relevant and cost-effective. From streamlining expenditure to changing how people use specific tools, actionable insights help real-time decision making.
- Simplify processes and reduce complexity. When every person hits an obstacle, the business needs to know about it. If a certain process slows everyone down, the business needs to know about it. Time delays, unhappy employees and poorly executed processes can be measured in both monetary and human costs. It’s not worth leaving legacy problems to fester when they can be easily overcome with the right insights and approaches.
- Improve efficiencies by providing employees with structured work spaces and fewer time sinks. Time sinks? The endless meetings, the unplanned requests, the endless bites into planned activities – these erode a person’s ability to do their job and to remain focused on their work. Analytics can help pinpoint individual and group areas of concern and effectively manage or remove them.
- Innovate and adapt more quickly to workplace demands, business process requirements and business outcomes. Use the information gleaned from analytics to put the business into what Microsoft terms ‘a continuous cycle of discovery and change’ that not only puts the business on an optimal path in terms of ongoing improvements, but can unearth and remove blockages.
- Hands on control over sites, cloud, on-prem and hybrid platforms. With the right analytics tool, you can improve management of sites such as SharePoint across multiple platforms and locations, and you can improve reporting and management across different tools and systems.
- Customizable insights for in-depth reporting and business management. Using the right tools, access and insights, the business can transform reporting and business management across multiple software platforms and systems. This not only improves their usage and employee understanding, but the businesses ability to make critical decisions.
Alternative workplace analytics tools
While Microsoft Workplace Analytics has powerful insights and data analytics capabilities, it’s worth looking at alternative solutions if you want to fully explore the potential of workplace analytics across various platforms and services. For example, CardioLog is capable of monitoring Sharepoint, Office 365, Teams, Yammer, Software-as-a-Service analytics for both SharePoint and Office 365, and JavaScript Tracking.
The solution can use JavaScript tracking to monitor and track a person’s activity across multiple sites and toolkits and help decision makers to engage with individuals in real time. This is particularly useful when managed alongside Microsoft Teams analytics that can identify influential users and build out reports. With this level of insight, business leaders can engage with the right people to fulfill specific tasks or build more active teams or translate activity into relevant productivity.
What’s really interesting is how these analytics tools can explore almost every part of an organization’s technology investment. They can be used to monitor intranet and extranet portals, to establish the most popular content and to unpack who the evangelists are. CardioLog has the ability to find out critical information about user interaction on SharePoint and SharePoint Social so that the business can optimize portals and social for maximum results. It can also use Teams and SharePoint to improve reporting, to manage engagement and so much more.
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