We’re back this week with another great tool from Microsoft that teams can use to improve efficiency, collaboration and even morale, all through better insights into patterns of work throughout the week.
The tool is MyAnalytics, and it’s a part of Microsoft 365. If your business is already using Microsoft 365 for access to other apps (including the Microsoft Office suite), you already have access to MyAnalytics at no additional charge.
Here’s what to know about this powerful tool.
MyAnalytics for Employees and Teams
First, let’s look at how MyAnalytics helps individuals and teams.
MyAnalytics uses the power of automation to intelligently analyze how users are spending their time at work. If that sounds overly invasive, don’t worry: MyAnalytics data remains anonymous and routes only to end users, according to Microsoft’s explainer.
How does this work, exactly? MyAnalytics looks at how users interact with email, chats and calls throughout the workday. It also analyzes meetings set up in Outlook calendars to determine in-person and virtual collaboration through formal meetings. The system also analyzes the number and type of documents you’ve worked on that are stored in OneDrive or on SharePoint.
Users in your organization then receive weekly updates (called the weekly digest) that offer insights into how they’re doing in terms of both collaboration and productivity. They also get access to a MyAnalytics dashboard, where they can explore their stats in depth and gain deeper insights into how to improve their productivity and reclaim their day.
Inline Suggestions and Email Insights in Outlook
Two more aspects of MyAnalytics are Inline Suggestions and email Insights in Outlook. These are powerful productivity aids that can make a big difference.
Inline suggestions are AI-driven prompts that occur in or alongside your message as you craft it. They can remind you to complete outstanding tasks, track email open rates, delay delivery, attach a missing attachment, and more.
Insights in Outlook is another suite of tools that can help you do more, faster, in a wide range of ways. Here are a few:
- View outstanding tasks: Outlook finds tasks it thinks you may have missed.
- Catch up on email: receive a summary of unread emails from more important contacts.
- Follow up: receive reminders about commitments or requests you’ve made.
- Prepare for your meetings: reminds you early in the day so you can get prepared for anything on the calendar.
What MyAnalytics Doesn’t Do
As great as MyAnalytics can be, it’s not all-powerful. There are a few things it doesn’t (or can’t) do, typically by design.
Distinguish Between Productive Collaboration and Watercooler Chats
First, MyAnalytics doesn’t analyze the contents of chats or calls in any significant way. This means that, while it can tell you were chatting via Teams for an hour last Monday, it can’t tell employees (or managers) whether that chat was business-focused. If you as a manager have cause for concern that employees are misusing tools, you’ll have to deal with that another way.
Ensure People Actually Focus During Focus Time
One of the great benefits of MyAnalytics is gaining insight into how much time you have for focused work (distinguished from time answering emails, sitting in meetings or on calls). But MyAnalytics can’t force you or anyone else to actually do focused work during that time, and it isn’t a tool for ensuring people are doing what they should.
Monitor Content or Activity
Along the same lines, MyAnalytics is not a content monitoring or filtering service. If you’re concerned that an employee is wasting focus time on YouTube (or worse), MyAnalytics doesn’t reveal this.
MyAnalytics Requires Configuration. We Can Help!
MyAnalytics can be a powerful tool for enhancing productivity and collaboration, improving morale in the process. But the tool does require some configuration to work properly. For help with MyAnalytics or any other managed IT needs, we’re here to help. Reach out today!