Microsoft’s new ‘Productivity Score’ lets your boss monitor how often you use email and attend video meetings

At Microsoft

MSFT
Ignite annual conference in October, the company introduced a nifty new tool called Productivity Score. During the virtual presentation, a senior product manager said the feature provides “insights that transform the way work is done” by showing employers how workers use Microsoft 365 services like Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive.

Productivity Score was officially launched less than a month later with little fanfare, but a closer look at the data Microsoft is letting employers see on workers reveals a “privacy nightmare,” researchers and advocates say. private life. The workplace monitoring tool gives managers, for example, the ability to find an employee by name and see how many hours they’ve spent in meetings on Microsoft Teams over the past 28 days. It also lets employers know how many days a person has been active on Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Skype, and Teams in the past month and on what type of device. On a smaller scale, employers can even see the number of days a specific person has sent an email with an @mention or the number of times their camera has been turned on in meetings. There are 73 pieces of granular worker behavior data that employers have access to, all associated with employees by name in a convenient dashboard, according to Microsoft’s own documentation reviewed by Forbes.

“It’s horrible,” said JS Nelson, associate professor of law at Villanova University who studies workplace surveillance. “Why are they monitoring people this way and what does it tell people about the relationship they should have with their employers in the workplace? What message are you sending? “

Microsoft denies that the productivity score equates to workplace monitoring, which is on the rise during the pandemic. “Let’s be clear: the productivity score is not a work tracking tool. The productivity score is about discovering new ways of working, giving your employees great collaboration and great technology experiences, ”said Jared Spataro, vice president of Microsoft 365 Corporate, in an October 29 blog post announcing officially this feature.

Productivity Score is not enabled by default, but when companies enable it, the program automatically displays data on individual employees. Employers can anonymize user data or refuse to use “people” data at all, but managers must manually change these settings.

“We make all of these choices available to customers, and we know very well how customers can and cannot use them,” said Melissa Grant, director of product marketing for Microsoft 365, in an interview with Forbes.

Grant added that the Productivity Score, which is available for any company with a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 business subscription, aggregates user-level data for a 28-day period, so managers cannot not explore and find out what programs an employee was. or did not use a specific day or time. After 28 days, all user-level data is deleted from the dashboard, and larger organization-level data is retained for 180 days.

Although managers can view data on individual employees, employees are not assigned individual productivity scores. Instead, the metric refers to a company-wide score of 800 calculated by adding “people experience” points and “technology experience” points. People experience measures how often employees use certain Microsoft 365 products, while technology experience measures device startup performance, application health, and network connectivity.

Grant said the tech giant decided to include data on individual employees by default, as it can help diagnose specific technical issues or identify people having issues with Microsoft applications. An employer, for example, might see that a particular employee attaches files to emails rather than sending a link through OneDrive. If an employer wants the office to use more cloud services, then the manager can send them a tutorial on sending shared files. In a video demonstrating the feature, Spataro said data on specific employees allows companies to identify “early adopters and potential advocates” of new “digital transformation” strategies.

Privacy advocates don’t buy it. Allowing employers to access data on individual employees is invasive, they say, and creates an environment in which workers are constantly on the cutting edge and fear being singled out. Microsoft also does not notify employees of monitored behavior, leaving that decision to companies that use the service. If the goal is to find out how workers are using technology, the more prudent solution would be to ask them, rather than sweeping up large swathes of arbitrary data that don’t actually measure productivity, worker performance, or the quality of work. work, Nelson, Professor Villanova, said.

“Having the numbers on something doesn’t mean you have a clue of what’s going on with your employees,” she said, adding that employees could just open a bunch of Word documents or find other ways. to increase their numbers.

Microsoft presents the productivity score as a way to drive ‘digital transformation’, but nothing prevents employers from using data at the individual level in evaluation or promotion decisions or as a pretext to fire or discipline employees . Bennett Cyphers, staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said it was easy to imagine productivity score data would be used to “exacerbate toxic work environments” as well as power imbalances among workers. and managers. Research has also shown that monitoring employees can lead to erosion of trust, decreased problem-solving performance, and lower job satisfaction.

“This is all like Microsoft trying to sell incentive products and make you completely dependent on the whole suite,” he said.

With Productivity Score, Microsoft joins a lucrative industry of startups selling worker tracking software. According to Market Research Future, the workplace monitoring industry is expected to reach a market of $ 3.84 billion by 2023, in part thanks to the skyrocketing use of remote workers during the pandemic. Businesses, feeling the need to make sure productivity doesn’t drop while working from home, turn to companies like ActivTrak, Hubstaff, and InterGuard, all of which take screenshots of employees’ computers and track the duration. use of certain programs by employees. More invasive software vendors, such as Teramind, allow employers to watch what workers are doing on their screens in real time.

“The world changes.” Workers know they are being watched, so it doesn’t violate privacy, Hubstaff co-founder Dave Nevogt told the New York Times

NOW
in May.

Microsoft doesn’t take screenshots or record video, but its adoption of individual employee monitoring is important. Microsoft 365 is the most popular workplace productivity software in the United States, according to an Otka 2020 survey, with more than 650,000 businesses as customers who now have access to the feature.

“I’m afraid that when Microsoft helps people access these employee monitoring dashboards, employees get used to living with that level of monitoring, and managers get used to having a good flow of data across. their employees and it will be a boon to the industry, ”Cyphers said.

Here are some of the data points that employers can see on individual workers:

• Email Sent Days: Number of days the user sent an email in the last 28 days.
• Teams Chat Usage Days: The number of days the user sent a chat message to Microsoft Teams in the last 28 days.
• Days in Outlook (Desktop): The number of days the person was active in Outlook on the desktop platform.
• Days in Outlook (Web): The number of days the person was active in Outlook on the web platform.
• Days in Outlook (mobile): The number of days the person was active in Outlook on the mobile platform.
• Content Read Days: Number of days the user accessed content (Microsoft Word / Excel / PowerPoint / OneNote or PDF type files) on OneDrive or SharePoint in the last 28 days.
• Content Creation Days: Number of days the user created, edited, or uploaded content (Microsoft Word / Excel / PowerPoint / OneNote or PDF files) to OneDrive or SharePoint in the last 28 days.
• OneDrive: A Boolean value indicating whether the person has had access to OneDrive for at least 1 of the last 28 days.
• SharePoint: A Boolean value indicating whether the person has had access to SharePoint for at least 1 of the last 28 days.
• Meetings Attended: Number of Microsoft Teams online meetings in the past 28 days
• Meetings with Screen Share Attended: Number of Microsoft Teams online meetings with screen share in the last 28 days
• Meetings with Video Attendance: Number of Microsoft Teams online meetings with video in the past 28 days
• Meeting hours: The number of hours spent in online Microsoft Teams meetings attended in the last 28 days