The Microsoft 365 Productivity Score has been raising concerns about staff privacy and intrusion into their ‘Work from Home’ life. We’ll look at what Productivity Score actually does, how it’s changed after public pressure and why administrators might prefer to be intrusive.
Productivity Score applies to Microsoft 365 hosted organizations. People or small businesses with Microsoft 365 Family/Home, Personal etc. are not affected.
What duzzit do?
Productivity Score analyses the online activity of staff to show reports on what parts of Microsoft 365 are getting used and what isn’t.
For example, the above sample shows 43% of staff collaborated on an Office document. That might be right for a company or suggest that staff need some training in document collaboration.
The ‘Technology Experience’ page shows potential problems with computers, networking or software that might cause trouble for staff. That’s especially an issue with staff working from home with their own equipment.
As you can see, each part gets a rating out of 100 for use of Microsoft 365 features over a 28 or 180 day period.
What’s all the fuss about?
The problem is with how admins can drill down to individual staff members to see details of how they are working and when. Some think that’s an excessive intrusion into staff lives, especially Work from Home.
Here’s an example of how Productivity Score could compare staff members by name under the heading ‘People in your organization’. It shows activity over the last 28 days.
The columns show: Name. Last Active, Country, Days sent email, Days used Chat. Days used channels, Days posted to Yammer.
Microsoft said:
“… not providing specific information on individualized actions, and instead only analyze user-level data aggregated over a 28-day period, so you can’t see what a specific employee is working on at a given time.
Productivity Score was built to help you understand how people are using the productivity tools and how well the underlying technology supports them in this.”
It’s true that Productivity Score doesn’t show individual actions and times, even the overall data and comparison could be considered intrusive.
In some instances, per-device information can be linked to individual staff members.
What’s happened?
Microsoft has changed Productivity Score by removing the ability to drill down to an individual level.
“… communications, meetings, content collaboration, teamwork, and mobility measures in Productivity Score will only aggregate data at the organization level—providing a clear measure of organization-level adoption of key features.
No one in the organization will be able to use Productivity Score to access data about how an individual user is using apps and services in Microsoft 365. “
With our highlighting …
“… we’re modifying the user interface to make it clearer that Productivity Score is a measure of organizational adoption of technology—and not individual user behavior. Over the last few days, we’ve realized that there was some confusion about the capabilities of the product.
Productivity Score produces a score for the organization and was never designed to score individual users. “
That last phrase is hard to believe. Microsoft did make Productivity Score capable of comparing individual staff members. Productivity Score had tables with usernames and data for each staffer plus special rules on who could access those lists.
What we think
We can understand administrators wanting individual information. For example, if admins see that some staff have low bandwidth connections, slow computers or not using VPN, they’d want to identify those people and help them.
Whether individual comparisons are intrusive or not somewhat depends on the organization and the quality of the management. Bad managers could misuse the data to browbeat individuals while others would understand that the information is just one part of an overall staff evaluation or comparison.
In other words, we’ve worked for companies that would make good use of Productivity Score and there’s other organizations which would make their staff feel spied upon.
We suspect Microsoft knew from the start this would be the sensitive part of Productivity Score. Their original promotion didn’t mention the ability to drill down to individuals and later documentation needed very close reading to reveal the possibility.
There were even extra privacy features in place to limit which admin levels had access to those user-identifiable lists.
Facts already available
Productivity Score is making use of logs and information already saved for each organization. It was, at least theoretically, possible for an admin to track the use of staff members before Productivity Score came along.
Certainly, emails sent/received can be monitored at an individual or message level with the Exchange Server logs.
Revisionist History
Microsoft is doing its usual revisionist routine of both denying there was a problem while removing the problem at the same time.
At least one Microsoftie had the grace to credit Wolfie Christl who revealed the extent of the problems with Productivity Score saying
“10,000 thanks to @WolfieChristl and others for the feedback which led to this change!”
Unfortunately that acknowledgement was undermined by the previous line.
“The thing I love most about MSFT is that when we screw up, we acknowledge the error and fix it.”
Really? Microsoft has a long, long track record of denying or hiding bugs and problems. Sometimes they admit the mistake, but only after they have changed course. Other times Microsoft blames customers or rewrites their corporate history.
As Joseph Arruda said in reply:
“ Let’s be clear, that’s a new behavior for MSFT, and one that no one who has dealt with you over time assumes has taken consistent hold. You have a ways to go in that regard. “
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