Workplace management needn’t mean workplace surveillance

How do you manage your workplace when your staff are no longer in an office?

This is the question that Microsoft was attempting to help answer when it launched the new productivity tool late last year. It was positioned as a means of enabling managers to make the most of their investments. However, the company’s ‘productivity score’ feature was rounded on by privacy campaigners, who criticised it as ‘workplace surveillance’, pointing to its ability to track the activity of individual employees. Being under constant surveillance, they said, amounted to a kind of psychological abuse.

The reality behind the productivity score is simply that it measures activities that are, based on metrics gained from a wide range of workplaces, reckoned to be a guide towards a productive workplace. In most cases they are analogous to the informal means of checking on staff activity that would go on in any workplace – who’s regularly turning up late, how they’re communicating with colleagues, what contribution they’re making to projects and so on, as well as who may be lacking in motivation, or working too hard, or for too many hours.

Digital tools can’t replace office presence, but are essential in a distributed organisation

In the absence of the ‘office walk-through’, Microsoft has provided metrics that attempt to approximate this for managers. Hence noting log-on times, emails sent, document collaboration and meetings attendance. The score itself is based on eight categories that, as well as human behaviour, include network measures such as app health and connectivity. Each category is weighted to 100 points, and the outputs include benchmarks against similar organisations as well as recommendations for improvement. The idea is that it helps to see how the organisation is using Microsoft 365, how similar organisations use it, and how it could be used better.  It doesn’t take too much thought to see the limitations in this approach.

Included in the bundling will be scores that are the opposite of the productivity a company may be looking for. Who wants their contact centre team, or their design team, to be in lots of meetings “collaborating”? And maybe short, infrequent meetings are more productive than regular long ones?

As always the devil is in the detail and 50% of statistics are lies.

In launching the productivity tool, Microsoft was attempting to use data to assist organisations on their path to digitisation. They had anticipated some of the concerns; access is restricted to a Global Administrator, and sharing advised ‘with discretion’. As with any tool, it can be misused. But, applied properly, and with suitable caution, good managers will find it an ally in monitoring and improving the workplace for both the organisation and its employees.

Just as a morning stroll around the office didn’t amount to psychological abuse, the productivity tool needn’t either.

For more about Microsoft’s Productivity Score take a look at An Introduction to Microsoft’s Productivity Score: Insights into Working Patterns