Microsoft's new Workplace Analytics will allow organizations to understand how their employees spend time

Microsoft today announced the general availability of Microsoft Workplace Analytics, a new organizational analytics solution that will provide rich, actionable insights into organization’s communication and collaboration trends to help make more effective business decisions. It is available as part of Office 365 enterprise plan as an add-on.

Workplace Analytics makes use of Office 365 email and calendar metadata, including to/from data, subject lines and timestamps to create set of behavioral metrics that can be used by the managers to know what’s going on in an organization. It also has built-in privacy and compliance capabilities that will allow organizations to decide how to apply insights generated by Workplace Analytics to solve business challenges.

Microsoft also allows organizations to create custom queries directly within Workplace Analytics. They can choose from a unique set of collaboration metrics to explore activities and trends within the business, including time spent in email, time in meetings, after-hours time and network size. They can also create custom queries and filter to aggregated population subsets including regions, roles and functions.

At Microsoft, Workplace Analytics has yielded significant insights. “We believe building a true digital, data-driven enterprise requires organizations to empower and connect their people across everything—people, processes, data and systems,” said Kathleen Hogan, chief people officer at Microsoft. “Our HR Business Insights group is using Workplace Analytics across a variety of initiatives—from understanding the behaviors driving increased employee engagement, to identifying the qualities of top-performing managers who are leading Microsoft’s cultural transformation from within. We believe people analytics is a competitive necessity for any HR team.”

You can learn more about Microsoft Workplace Analytics here.