Did you know that Microsoft has Workplace Analytics, a program that allows managers to assess the productivity of their staff using data gathered from email, documents, calendar, and other Office 365 applications? It’s an improvement over MyAnalytics, which only allowed employees to view their own data. Now managers can also access their employees’ data for evaluation.

How it works

A paid add-on to Office 365 enterprise plans, Workplace Analytics extracts behavioral insights from data gathered from Office 365 email, calendar, documents, and Skype. This means any data an employee types into their email and calendar — whether on the subject line or in the body itself — can be used to indicate their productivity status.

The program has an overview dashboard that provides specific information:

• Week in the Life provides an overall view of how the entire organization spends time and how members collaborate
• Meetings shows the amount of time spent in meetings
• Management and Coaching gauges one-on-one meetings between staff and manager
• Network and Collaboration takes a look at how employees connect to colleagues

What does it aim to do?

According to Microsoft, Workplace Analytics addresses businesses’ most common challenges: complexity, productivity, and engagement.

Using Workplace Analytics data, managers and human resources departments can form productivity strategies for the entire company. If most of your employees spend 60% of their time attending meetings and not enough time doing creative work, managers can come up with a strategy to reduce meeting times and focus more on productive tasks.

It also identifies how employees collaborate with internal and external parties. Suppose one of your sales staff frequently communicates with certain contacts. By using Workplace Analytics data, the employee’s manager would be able to determine whether this particular collaboration pattern is helping the employee hit sales targets or whether he or she is missing out on other more critical contacts. Based on this info, managers would also be able to determine which employees are most likely to meet or exceed their targets and set company-wide standards accordingly.

Workplace Analytics also allows managers to determine an employee’s level of engagement (i.e., whether the organization’s collaboration patterns are good for the company), and whether workloads are fairly distributed among workers and/or departments.

Is it useful for small businesses?

Large corporations have been using Workplace Analytics, but small businesses can also benefit from it. The data used to provide insights are what employees generate themselves — how much time they spend on meetings, whom they frequently communicate with, and how much time they spend on productive tasks.

Aside from letting managers examine their staff’s work behavior, Workplace Analytics also provides an overall look at an organizational level. If you want your organization to further harness the capabilities of Workplace Analytics and other Office 365 tools, give us a call today.

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In the software industry, continuous improvement is the name of the customer retention game. The behemoth Microsoft constantly churns out Office 365 enhancements, many of which are powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Here are some of the new and upcoming ones most likely to be useful in your business.

Office

Write and draw with digital ink

Typing is easy on desktops and laptops, but when you’re on touch-enabled devices, keyboards are cumbersome to use, whether they are extra hardware or as space invaders on your screen. Now, the Draw tab is available on your favorite Office programs so you can use your finger, a stylus, or a mouse to doodle and write. You can automatically convert your handwriting to text in Word or OneNote by implementing the handwriting input function of your Windows 10 touch keyboard.

Chat with colleagues right inside the app

Now available exclusively to Office 365 subscribers, the chat function lets team members message one another within a Word document, PowerPoint presentation, or Excel spreadsheet as they work on it together.

Word

Write with your voice

Ever wished you had a personal secretary who could type dictation for you? As an Office 365 subscriber, you won’t need one. Sign into your account, turn on your microphone, then go to Home > Dictate (in Outlook, go to Message > Dictate instead). Once the Dictate icon turns red, you can start writing your document just by speaking. It’s that easy! Now available in Word for Office 365, Outlook for Office 365, PowerPoint for Office 365, and OneNote for Windows 10.

Edit documents with natural gestures

With your handwriting and voice digitized into standard text, editing your document is easy, thanks to natural gestures. It’s like using a pen to insert or cross out words on printouts, but immediately seeing your edits afterward! Other magical things you can do include inserting spaces and paragraph breaks, stringing broken-up words together, and circling text to select it. Now available in Word for Office 365 and Word Mobile.

PowerPoint

Transform your scribbles

Sometimes you need to draw or write by hand to get stuff down quickly. Using digital ink can be the quickest way to communicate, but turning scribbles into editable text or easy-to-manipulate shapes for a slideshow presentation later on is time-consuming.

Or rather, that was the case, because now Ink to Text and Ink to Shape can convert your handwriting and hand drawings into standard text or shapes, respectively. Now available for PowerPoint for Office 365, PowerPoint for iPad, and PowerPoint for iPhone. Ink to Shape is also available exclusively to Office 365 subscribers on Excel for Office 365, Word for Office 365, Excel 2016, Word 2016, and Visio Online Plan 2.

Excel

“Ideas” literally let you work smarter

Pie charts, bar graphs, scatter diagrams — with so many ways to visualize data, it can become troublesome to implement the right graph. Thankfully, the upcoming Ideas will let AI come up with the most apt graphs for you. Just click on a cell in a data table, click the Ideas button on the Home tab, then voila! Excel comes up with charts for you to choose from. It can even set trend lines, recognize outliers, and create summaries for you — all without having to write an unwieldy formula! Coming soon to Excel for Office 365, Excel for Office 365 for Mac, and Excel Online.

A picture is worth a thousand data points

Since optical character recognition software is already a couple of decades old, it’s about time we’re able to extract data tables from pictures. Soon, the Insert data from picture function will let us encode ingredients lists from recipes and digitize printed receipts by taking their photos. Coming soon to Excel for Android tablets and Excel for Android phones.

One formula, many values

For so long, Excel users had to enter a formula and copy it to get multiple values (known as an array) from their data tables. With dynamic arrays, however, all you have to do is write a formula once, press Enter, and you’ll instantly get values for entire columns or tables instantly, which means faster processing with fewer errors. To illustrate, you can use a dynamic array to fill up entire multiplication tables, and when you change or add more factors, the array will recalculate and resize automatically. Coming soon to Excel for Office 365 and Excel for Office 365 for Mac.

Outlook

Quickly create tasks

Outlook now lets you create tasks and to-do lists the way you write emails. Just click Tasks > New Tasks, type the name of the task in the Subject box, and add task details in the body. You can also set its priority, start and due dates, and even a reminder for it.

Additionally, you can create tasks out of emails by dragging an email to Tasks on the navigation bar. This is way faster than copy-pasting email contents onto the body of a task, though keep in mind that email attachments aren’t carried over to the newly made task.

Make the most out of Office 365! If you’re already a subscriber or are currently looking into it, let us help you configure and implement it for maximum productivity.

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