Workplace Analytics – September 2018: Teamwork solution, Admin onboarding, and more

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Workplace Analytics & MyAnalytics Blog articles.

The Workplace Analytics team is excited to announce our feature updates for September (see past blog articles here). In this update, you’ll discover the latest, including:

 

    • Admin onboarding
    • Visualize external collaboration
    • New chart capabilities
    • Filter by activity status
    • Teamwork solution
    • Power BI templates

 

Admin onboarding

A more helpful setup and configuration experience is in store for admins when they open Workplace Analytics for the first time. The product will present them with an introduction and then walk them through the setup process step-by-step. This gives admins a foundation for configuring privacy settings, defaults settings, and organizational data.

 

Note that this new onboarding experience is only for new customers. Existing customers will not see it.

For the admin of a new customer, the new onboarding screens will appear automatically. These include the initial screen, which is shown in the following illustration:

 

1. Welcome WpA Admin.png

 

This new onboarding experience offers admins the following:

  • A self-driven setup process that includes videos, descriptions, and contextual links to documentation throughout.
  • Offline steps that are explained with guidance about who is required and what information is needed for setup.
  • Orientation for admins that is provided by an introduction, an overview, and step-by-step progress tracker.
  • Increased transparency into processing times and a clear indication of whether the next step is to be performed by the admin or by the system.

 

Visualize external collaboration

If you have an analyst or program-manager role, you can use the new External collaboration page in Workplace Analytics to understand employees’ networking patterns with people outside your company. You use this information to visualize how departments and other groups within your company spend their time interacting with people in external domains. This kind of interaction typically means collaboration with customers, business partners, or suppliers.

 

These networking patterns are presented in graphs that let you sort and manipulate data. You can apply menu settings to view the data in different ways – for example, collaboration hours or collaboration cost. You can also apply filters to extract the information you want.

 

To view external collaboration data

  1. In the left navigation pane, open the Workplace Analytics Home page and then, under Explore the metrics, select External collaboration - OR - In the left navigation pane, select Explore and then, on the Explore page, select the External collaboration tab.  
  1. On the External collaboration page, you can manipulate the graphs by applying filters and by pivoting on different parameters.

Most graphs include trend charts and distribution charts. Trend charts show changes over time – for example, the trend of a group average, month by month. Distribution charts show the statistical distribution of metrics, such as the minimum, maximum, median, and upper and lower percentiles for the group.

 

The following screenshots show several views of the external-collaboration data:

 

External collaboration summary

On the Summary header, see overall statistics for collaboration between internal employees and external contacts: 

2. Engagement and networks.jpg

 

External domains

Determine which external domains your employees spend the most time with:3. Discover which external.jpg

 

Internal groups

Find out which internal groups have the most people who collaborate externally:4. Which groups have the most.jpg

 

For more examples and more details, see External collaboration in the product documentation.

 

New chart capabilities

All of the charts in Workplace Analytics will now offer new capabilities. Hover over a chart and you now see a toolbar that gives you the option to change the chart’s metric or the chart type and to download a .csv file that contains the chart’s data.

 

Although these changes are most noticeable in the Explore dashboards (because the dashboards offer so many charts), they represent an overarching framework for all of the charts in Workplace Analytics.

 

All of the features of the Explore dashboards are still available; they now appear in a new, centralized location. For example, on the Explore dashboards, the box plots are now accessible by changing the chart type of the default column chart that is displayed.

 

On the Sources page and on the Solutions page, hovering over a chart displays the new toolbar:

 

Example 1: Hover and then change chart type:5. All collaboration hours.png

 

Example 2: Hover and then change chart metric:6. Meeting hours drop down.png

 

Data download

All charts will now have the option to download a .csv file of the chart data. This is the summary data displayed in the chart, not the underlying query; the minimum group size is still protected in the download.

 

Filter by activity status

Analysts will now be able to filter their Explore dashboards, certain query types, and the Solutions > Identify page by the activity status of employees.

This lets analysts see a more accurate picture of the data, explore the impact of inactive employees on the data, and run smaller queries by filtering out inactive employees who are not relevant to the current analysis.

 

The following illustrations show how this new feature appears.

 

Solutions> Identify page

To filter by activity status, select All employees, Active only, or Inactive only.

7. Edit page filters.png

 

Queries

The new active-employee filtering is available for two types of queries: person and person-to-group. In both query types, to filter by activity status, select All employees, Active only, or Inactive only. Read more about the new feature in our documentation.

 

Person query

8. Person query all employees.png

 

Person-to-group query9. Person to group query active only.png 

Teamwork solution

Workplace Analytics has recently introduced a solution to help turn organization-wide insights into action plans for individuals and teams. Through the following three steps, the Workplace Analytics solution for teamwork helps teams build better collaboration habits and master their time by guiding organizations:

 

  • Discover collaboration changes
  • Empower teams to change
  • Measure and improve

These steps are described in the following sections.

 

Discover collaboration challenges

Use data from everyday work in Office 365, like emails and meetings, to discover challenges like meeting overload, minimal time for focused work, or high after-hours workload. Combine these insights with engagement survey results to find connections between work patterns and indicators of team health like engagement and innovation scores.

 

10. Welcome WpA page.gifAnalysis shows that the marketing team spends far more time in meetings than other teams and could benefit from being enrolled in a change program to help reduce meeting hours.

 

Empower teams to change

Enroll teams in change programs to help them build better habits like bringing agendas to meetings and blocking time for daily focused work. Participants receive personal productivity insights and action plans powered by MyAnalytics.

 

11. MyA Action Plan.png

When teams are enrolled in a change program, members get access to an action plan in MyAnalytics that shows progress towards meeting team goals.

 

Measure and improve

Make sure your change programs are successful by measuring progress against goals over time. Iterate and improve as you see which action plans succeed or fail in changing teamwork habits.

 

12. Track WpA.png

 This team is four weeks into their change program and has already decreased average weekly meeting hours by 11%.

 

The Workplace Analytics solution for teamwork—accessed via the Solutions tab—is now available for customers using both Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics. Learn more about the Workplace Analytics solution for teamwork.

 

Power BI templates in Workplace Analytics

The Workplace Analytics Queries page now provides a Power BI template that analysts can use to visualize areas of collaboration overload in their organization. This template performs two tasks: it pre-populates a Workplace Analytics query and it selects the proper Power BI charts to display the results of that query.

 

To use the Collaboration overload Power BI template

  • In Workplace Analytics, select Queries.
  • On the Queries page, notice the template query card called Collaboration Overload.
  • Select the Collaboration Overload query card. This opens a preset query that contains all the required metrics to properly populate the PBI template.
  • Select Run. This opens the Query > Results page. This page displays a row for every run of a query, including the query that you just ran.
  • On the Query > Results page, select the download (down-arrow) icon:

     13. PBI Query results.jpg

  • Select PBI template. This displays a dialog box that informs you that the OData link for this query has been copied to the clipboard. You will use this OData link in Power BI.
  • Select OK to dismiss the dialog box. The Power BI template query results file is now downloaded.
  • In your browser, select the downloaded Power BI template query results file to open it.
  • If a dialog box prompts you to select a program, choose Power BI:
  • The Power BI template query results file opens in Power BI. You are prompted to paste the OData link:

14. Collab overload PBI.png

 

  • Paste the OData link and select Load.
  • After the data loads, Power BI displays it in charts that provide visualization into your organization’s collaboration patterns:

 

Collab Image PBI.PNG

 

 

 

Please let us know if you have any feedback on the features described in this blog. Stay tuned for feature announcements coming next month!

 

Learn more about Workplace Analytics on our product page and read about our work with customers at insights.office.com. Get personal insights with MyAnalytics

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