Get the most out of Microsoft 365 with Productivity Score

Get the most out of Microsoft 365 with Productivity Score

If you haven’t already, now is the time to adopt Microsoft 365. This powerful suite of applications combines online versions of familiar Microsoft Office programs such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools like Teams, Outlook, and OneDrive. For as low as CAD25 per user per month, your organization can enjoy improved communication, secure cloud storage, and increased flexibility, among many other benefits.

Now, you can also get insights into your team’s experience with Microsoft 365 using the new Productivity Score feature. Introduced in late 2020, Microsoft Productivity Score breaks down users’ experience with Microsoft 365 apps and services, and measures the performance of the devices that run these. It also recommends actions you can take to leverage the full potential of Microsoft 365.

What is Microsoft Productivity Score?

Productivity Score gives you insights into how your employees are using Microsoft 365 apps to do their jobs. It pulls data from across the Microsoft 365 environment over a certain period; based on the collected data, it will calculate your overall productivity score, which you can view in Microsoft admin center’s Reports section.

While Productivity Score provides generalized information, you can get deeper insights into each of the metrics that Microsoft measures to calculate your scores in the people experience and technology experience categories (more on these later). You can use this information to develop a strategy to promote more efficient use of Microsoft 365 and, in turn, increase productivity.

You can also compare your productivity score to benchmarks from organizations similar to yours in terms of number of users, length of time using Microsoft 365, industry, and other relevant factors. This will allow you to identify opportunities for improvement and best practices to adapt, as well as areas to focus on to streamline and speed up your business’s digital transformation.

How do you calculate your productivity score?

Your business’s overall productivity score is based on its score in two categories: people experience and technology experience. Both categories are divided into several key areas, each worth 100 points.

The people experience category focuses on how Microsoft 365 is actually being used by your team and how it enhances engagement and productivity in your company. It rates your employees’ experience with Microsoft 365 in terms of communication, collaboration, meetings, teamwork, and mobility.

  • Communication – reflects how your employees find and share information through email, chat, and community posts
  • Content collaboration – shows how your staff create, view, and work with one another in the cloud
  • Meetings – provides data on how often your employees have Microsoft Teams meetings and how many of these follow the best practices for engagement during Teams meetings
  • Teamwork – provides data on the use of shared resources such as workspaces and inboxes
  • Mobility – indicates how many users are active on at least two platforms (i.e., mobile and desktop)

The technology experience category focuses on the health and performance of the endpoints, networks, and apps your staff use.

  • Endpoint analytics – assesses the possible impacts of issues with your business’s endpoint hardware and software
  • Network connectivity – provides visibility into factors that affect your network’s health and performance
  • Microsoft 365 apps health – keeps track of the number of devices running the most current version of each of the Microsoft 365 tools your staff use, thus ensuring that everything is secure and optimized

Your score in each of these areas is added to get your overall productivity score, which is expressed as both a percent value and in points (i.e., your actual score over the maximum possible score of 800). For instance, if your total score in all eight of the above categories is 560, it will be reflected as 70% and as 560/800.

Can Productivity Score monitor your employees’ activities?

As mentioned, Productivity Score enables you to dive deeper into each of the metrics measured under the people experience and the technology experience category. For example, you can see how often people are viewing or co-editing documents on Microsoft OneDrive. You can also get recommendations on how to best keep your employees in touch and on the same page, such as by enabling certain features of Microsoft Teams and Outlook.

However, you won’t get complete visibility into everything that each of your employees does every day. Productivity Score only aggregates data within the people experience category at the organization level, so you won’t see information about individual users and how they are using Microsoft 365 apps and services.

This is good news for employees who may be wary of Productivity Score because of privacy issues. Get their buy-in by explaining that Productivity Score isn’t a surveillance tool; rather, it’s a way to measure and manage Microsoft 365 adoption so your team gets the most out of it.

Do you have questions about Microsoft Productivity Score or the benefits of Microsoft 365? Get in touch with Quicktech today. Our Microsoft-certified professionals are more than happy to answer your questions. They’ll also take the time to get to know your business and match you up with the best solutions to help your employees and company grow. You can also download our free eBook to learn more about Microsoft 365’s productivity-enhancing features.