IT consultants have been busy helping companies transition to cloud business tools like Microsoft 365. In November 2019, there were 20 million daily users of Teams, and by November 2020, that number jumped to 115 million.
But just moving to a cloud productivity platform doesn’t mean a team is being as productive as possible. There are many best practices and ways to use cloud tools that can shave minutes off each day and hours off each week.
Microsoft designed a way to improve use of its platform through insights into areas like communication, teamwork, and application health. The tool that does this is called Microsoft Productivity Score.
Overview of Microsoft Productivity Score The goal of Microsoft Productivity Score is to help companies find those minutes and hours of additional productivity. It helps companies understand how employees are using Microsoft 365 and provides recommendations for improvement. Productivity score looks at two main categories of metrics:
People experiences (5 metrics)
Technology experiences (3 metrics) Within the people experiences, the tool measures teamwork, communication, content collaboration, mobility, and meetings. For the technology experiences, scores are provided for endpoint analytics, network connectivity, and Microsoft 365 apps health. Beyond scoring from 1-100 on each of those eight metrics areas, Productivity Score also has an additional reporting for business continuity. This is designed to help companies gauge any changes in productivity due to a move to remote working.
What Microsoft Productivity Score Provides
Metrics that help a company see where they are on their digital transformation.
Insights through quantitative data that help uncover opportunities for improving productivity and satisfaction.
Recommended actions to take to improve an organization’s use of Microsoft 365 applications.
Pre-requisites to Use Productivity Score To use the tool, you need to have a Microsoft 365 for business or Office 365 for enterprise subscription. To use the endpoint analytics metric, you need Microsoft Intune endpoint device manager. Productivity Score is accessed in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, and users need to have one of the following roles to access it:
Global admin
Exchange admins
SharePoint admin
Skype for Business admin
Teams admin
Global Reader
Reports Reader
Usage Summary Reports Reader The app looks at use of multiple Microsoft 365 apps, including:
OneDrive
Teams
Exchange Online
SharePoint
Word
Excel
PowerPoint
Outlook
Yammer
Scores & Insight Data
The top score for each of the eight categories is 100 points, for an overall score of 800 points for everything in Productivity Score. Here are some of the insights you’ll find when accessing the tool.
Content Collaboration
One of the primary insights in this area is how your team is sharing information and whether or not they’re collaborating effectively. One of the metrics you’ll see is a gauge of how many readers, creators, and collaborators in your organization are working together in online files.
All images, credit: Microsoft
Communication
According to Microsoft, research shows that using real-time communication tools fosters a more unified organization and builds morale, no matter where everyone is working.
A primary metric this area shows is how many people are using more than one way to communicate with each other (Yammer posts, email, Teams, etc.).
Meetings People can save as much as 104 minutes per week if they use meeting tools effectively. This area of Productivity Score measures meeting best practices against current use. Some of those best practices include:
Turning on video during meetings
Sharing screens to focus the conversation
Sharing files to help people absorb the information