Power your digital transformation with insights from Microsoft Productivity Score

Editor’s Note: The Mechanics video embedded in this blog post has been updated to reflect some of the product changes announced on December 1, 2020.

For some time now, business leaders have made digital transformation a priority. But when the pandemic hit this spring, adopting and embracing digital technology went from being a matter of importance to one of sheer survival. COVID-19 has catapulted us into the era of digital everything. And to keep up with the pace of change, and build more resilient businesses to meet future challenges, we need to move digital transformation from art to science.

As leaders, it’s our job to make sure people have the tools they need to do their best work. But tools alone are not enough—you also need to help everyone in your organization build the habits that harness the true power of those tools. Until now, it’s been difficult for leaders to get insight into these habits and understand how to help people make the most of the technology they invest in. Today, with the announcement of the general availability of Microsoft Productivity Score, we take an important step forward. Let’s take a look at how Productivity Score can help your people succeed today and in the future.

Using Productivity Score to help power your digital transformation #

As we’ve talked with many of you about your digital transformation efforts, we’ve heard that you need a better way to measure the value you’re getting from Microsoft 365 beyond usage. Productivity Score builds upon the Microsoft Graph data to give you insights that help you quantify what is happening across your organization and use aggregated measures to drive better outcomes for people by leveraging technology.

Because while every digital transformation is different, they all come down to those two things: people and technology. People are your most important asset, and helping them adapt to new ways of working is key to any successful transformation. Technology, meanwhile, is the enabler, helping to unleash the ingenuity that only people possess. Productivity Score leverages the depth and breadth of Microsoft 365 to give you visibility into how your organization works, insights to identify where you can make improvements, and actions you can take to update skills and systems so that everyone can do their best work. It shows you people experiences across five categories: content collaboration, meetings, communication, teamwork, and mobility. Meanwhile, technology experiences focus on endpoints, network connectivity, and Microsoft 365 Apps.

Using the insights Productivity Score provides, we can also help you improve experiences over time by recognizing and proactively addressing issues so you can derive more value from your investment. Productivity Score identifies areas where you can offer people training to learn how to use the tools to their fullest capacity. For example, the new teamwork category (available today) provides a score based on the percentage of people who engage in teamwork within shared workspaces like SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and group mailboxes in Exchange. You can see how this engagement has changed over the past six months, which helps you measure your transformation journey. Insights like this can also help you to identify possible training opportunities so your users can collaborate in new or more efficient ways. You can learn more about this and other scenarios in the Mechanics video.


Figure 1: Teamwork category page 

Commitment to privacy #

Microsoft runs on trust, and we have a strong commitment to privacy across all our services. Using data responsibly is at the heart of how we built Productivity Score. Productivity Score gives you important insights about your organization, but we know you have a critical need to maintain users’ trust while using those data insights responsibly. You need a choice in who and to what level people in your organization can see user-level data.

We get it, and we are committed to privacy as a fundamental element of Productivity Score. Let me be clear: Productivity Score is not a work monitoring tool. Productivity Score is about discovering new ways of working, providing your people with great collaboration and technology experiences. It focuses on actionable insights about the ways in which people and teams are using the tools so you can make improvements or provide training to further your digital transformation. For example, to help maintain privacy and trust, the user data provided in Productivity Score is aggregated over a 28-day period. We also give you controls so you can anonymize the user info or even remove it. You can learn more on the documentation page.

From art to science #

Digital transformation is a challenge for all of us, but it doesn’t have to be a mystery. Productivity Score illuminates the essential insights to move your transformation from art to science, just as it’s doing at Nestlé, one of the largest food companies in the world. As you can see in this video, Nestle is using Productivity Score to transform assumptions into data-based facts that the company uses to build better user experiences. And as we hear incredible digital transformation stories like these from customers around the world, we hope that Productivity Score, along with the insights that are coming to Microsoft Teams, will help you discover even more ways to succeed in a new world of work.

Ready to get started? We are starting to roll out Productivity Score in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center (Note: only users granted the Reports Reader role and higher can access the page). And to learn more and get additional resources, check out The Definitive Guide to Productivity Score. Finally, you can join the Productivity Score “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) on November 17, 2020—my team will be ready and eager to answer all your questions.

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