Workplace Analytics – August 2019: Feature updates

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 August (see past blog articles here). In this update, you’ll discover the latest, including: 

  • Opportunities scan
  • Customize network metrics
  • Peer analysis
  • Visualize person queries

 

Opportunities scan

Workplace Analytics has always offered unique insights that help organizations achieve productivity gains. But to take advantage of these opportunities, it took a specialized analyst who understood what to look for and how to get to the data. The latest AI-powered capability from Workplace Analytics, Opportunities scan, uses machine learning and automation to uncover hidden opportunities for effective and timely intervention.

 

Analysts access Opportunities scan on the new Opportunities tab on the Solutions page. Selecting this tab shows a high-level summary of the available opportunities. Opportunities are dynamic in nature and change every week.

1. Solutions scan landing page.png

 

On the Opportunities page, select one of the displayed opportunities to see a detailed Result page:

2. Solutions scan Results.bmp

 

On the Result page, analysts can examine the opportunity potential in detail. In this example illustration, the opportunity shown is Increase focus, which aims to give employees more time in the day to do deep, focused work. On this page, the analyst is given the option to immediately start a Plan to help employees achieve that goal.

 

Customize network metrics

Workplace Analytics offers several network metrics:

  • Internal network size
  • External network size
  • Networking outside organization
  • Networking outside company

Until recently, it was difficult to explore aspects of network connections deeply, so the Workplace Analytics team responded by adding customization capabilities to these metrics. These new capabilities let users customize the organizational data (HR) attributes of employees who are involved in a network connection. 

 

Example

Sarah is an analyst at Contoso, Inc. She wants to explore the level of network connections made by Contoso’s sales team in the past three months, and specifically what types of customers they maintain network bonds with. To research these things, she uses Workplace Analytics queries to do the following:

  1. Narrow down the initiator to the sales team at Contoso.
  2. Filter by organizational data to view participants by groups such as domain and organization.
  3. For each organizational data attribute selected, run a query to see the level/trend of network connection in that group.

Sarah is aware that each of the network metrics she’ll be working with has two customizable fields, Initiator and Participant. So, to complete steps 1 and 2, Sarah modified the attributes of the initiator and of the participants per network connection. She did this customization by first selecting metrics to customize and then by applying filters: 

Select metrics

3. Select metrics.png

 

Apply filters

4. Apply filters.png

 

After running this query, Sarah obtained results that gave her the details about the sales team’s network connections that she needed.

 

Peer analysis

Companies are eager to determine what makes their people succeed. A central aspect of this search is understanding what collaborative and networking behaviors make people more effective. Workplace Analytics has a wealth of expertise and insights around these behaviors, but they are not always obvious and readily available to everyone. The new Peer analysis capability helps analysts unlock this hidden value in an easy-to-use interface, with the goal of using these insights to benefit the broader population.

 

The sequence of a peer analysis unfolds like this: First, the analyst identifies a reference group – a group of people who’ve demonstrated successful collaboration and networking behaviors – and another group, for comparison. Then, they apply conditions that help ensure an apples-to-apples comparison. Finally, they submit the analysis and view the results (which remain de-identified at the individual level).

 

Analysts start this sequence with the Peer analysis tile in the newly re-designed Explore page:

5. Peer Analysis card.png

 

On this page, they can create, launch, view, and manage analyses. After the analysis is ready, it lets them see detailed visual results across a range of metrics with commentary about why each metric is relevant to the analysis:

6. Peer Analysis Result.png

 

Visualize person queries

Until recently, after an analyst ran a query, they had to download the results or copy an OData link to analyze the results, which they did outside of Workplace Analytics. Now, after creating and running a person query, they can view its results (in the form of charts) without leaving Workplace Analytics. Further, they can refine their results view by having the charts focus on any of the metrics that they used in the query or on organizational data attributes that have been uploaded. 

 

The steps to run a query and view results are:

  1. Define and run a person query. For more information, see Person queries.
  2. After the query finishes, open the Results
  3. In the row of the query's results, select the Visualize option:

7. Vis button.png

 

This opens a page in the Queries > Results area of Workplace Analytics:

8. Vis results.png

 

On this page, the analyst can explore the query results by using a variety of chart types, common chart controls, and the page settings that are available on the Explore dashboards. Further, the analyst can select groups in the chart and enroll them in a Solutions plan

9. Vis plan.png

 

The ability to create a Solutions plan directly from query results means that analysts can use customized metrics to help identify opportunities for plans. This lets organizations more easily apply their business context to arrive at more useful Solutions scenarios.

 

To summarize: The Visualize person queries capability helps jumpstart the analyst’s work while still providing the flexibility they need to go deeper and create more customized views. This lets them more quickly (because they don’t need to switch between applications) identify opportunity groups in their results. Query visualization also increases security; by reducing the need to download results, it’s less likely that results get misused or shared in an unsafe way.

 

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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