Just like people, organizations can have intelligence too. 鈥淲orkplace intelligence鈥� describes things like culture, climate, leadership, and employee engagement that create a great place to work鈥揳nd deliver positive business outcomes.
Horizons by 51风流talked with Ryan Fuller, corporate vice president of Workplace Intelligence for Microsoft Corporation, about the meaning of workplace intelligence, the technology tools needed to develop it, and the trick to using data-driven insights securely and with trust.
Q: The term 鈥渨orkplace intelligence鈥� is relatively new. How would you define it?
A: Overall, it鈥檚 about working smarter, not harder, but not just at an individual level. We want to find ways to make the whole organization work smarter. It鈥檚 often not clear how to do that, because it鈥檚 hard to understand how the things hundreds or thousands of employees do each day add up to the results that companies actually measure.
How do you get a clear picture of what鈥檚 happening?
You need to be able to zoom way out to be able to see the whole picture. That requires the right kind of data, so you can identify the patterns that lead to better outcomes. Often companies spend huge amounts of time doing things that don鈥檛 add that much value. How can we stop doing those things and devote the time to more impactful things? Or give our employees more of their time back, so they can live fuller lives beyond work?
The idea of continuous improvement has been around for a long time. Yet in many organizations, it feels like we鈥檙e going in the wrong direction.
Workplace intelligence helps us create some new patterns that reverse that trajectory. It gives everybody the tools, visibility, and data to know how to work as effectively as possible in the shortest amount of time possible.
What is the first place to start experimenting, once you鈥檝e freed up some capacity?
We like to look for bright spots鈥搕hose parts of the team or organization that consistently outperform their peers. Oftentimes, leaders know that a given team is great, but don鈥檛 know why. Usually the team doesn鈥檛 know either鈥搕hey just know that they do good work.
How do you figure it out?
When we focus on the behavioral data, we can start to see patterns. Let鈥檚 say you learn that the team spends 50 percent more time with customers than any other team. You then learn that happened when their management decided to spend less time on forecasting and internal processes. Although it鈥檚 a simple change, it鈥檚 massively impactful in terms of how people have been able to spend their time. And now you have a proven pattern within your own organization that you can scale.
Success breeds success.
Exactly. If you can find areas that are working, you can then figure out why and how it happened and scale it out. Next, you must spot opportunities to improve and enact those changes elsewhere. Companies get into this continuous cycle where people identify opportunities, use data to figure out a better path forward, and then enact change programs. Then they measure results. The idea is to encourage a culture of experimentation and learning.
What kinds of capabilities or functionality are needed to execute this type of program?
My team specializes in compiling passive, aggregated, and deidentified data automatically generated from e-mails, meetings, chats鈥揳ll kinds of collaboration tools that companies use. We turn that data into a behavioral data set. From that data, you can understand how people spend time, which teams are spending time with other teams, and what people鈥檚 networks look like. You can derive all of these very interesting insights that are really hard to measure in any other way. As a result, company leaders can get a full understanding of exactly how that process works. They can tell whether it is efficient or needs to be improved.
In your research and your work with customers, have the analytics revealed any surprises?
Very frequently, actually. For example, sales leaders often say that sellers should spend most of their time with customers. We can look at the data to see how teams are working, how they engage with customers, how much time they spend on different activities, who they bring to the meeting, and what
their networks are like. You can also see which patterns correlate most with revenue generation. And top performers do tend to spend more time with customers. But even more predictive of better performance is that top performers have larger internal networks鈥搈eaning that they engage with more people within their own company more frequently than others do.
Why is that?
When you think about it, sales is not a one-person activity. For example, you must know the right specialist to bring into a customer meeting, or the person in legal that can push through a contract quickly, or how your product team is thinking about the road map. In fact, your ability to bring everything that your company can offer to a customer is really contingent upon your personal network. That takes work and a lot of time. If you spend 90 percent of your time with customers, how are you going to know anybody at your company?
So, how do people react when they get these insights?
Sales leaders initially find it counterintuitive that internal network is so important. Once they see the data, they can quantify how that networking accelerates the ability to produce revenue. Then they understand the value of this intelligence.
What kind of tools are available to help companies develop more workplace intelligence?
It starts with identifying new insights from a behavioral data set. That鈥檚 what Microsoft Workplace Analytics offers. Instead of relying on surveys, anecdotes, and consultants to know what鈥檚 happening, the technology provides an objective, always-current data set. You can set new goals for what you want to achieve and then operationalize it by putting in place some lever to drive change.
How would that look in your sales example?
Management could decide that employees need time to develop those personal networks. Perhaps they redesign sales territories to make them smaller. Then we measure to see if that has an impact. The data helps you know when to make a change. And then you can operationalize it using traditional management levers, like a dashboard.
Where do the employees鈥� decisions come into play?
The next layer is addressed by products such as Microsoft MyAnalytics. Let鈥檚 say you realize that teams with higher employee satisfaction have managers who spend more time in one-on-one meetings with their direct reports. This context-aware technology provides employees with individualized, personal insights that help them accomplish their goals. Maybe a calendar app sends a message suggesting that a meeting with your direct report Brian is overdue, and it notes that you鈥檙e both free tomorrow at 2:30. The software prompts you to send a meeting invitation. We try to engage users at just the right moment with helpful information that will help them be more productive and engaged.
What different types of assistance can employees benefit from?
Some solutions make it easier for a user to do something they already intended to do, like automatically filling in the rest of an e-mail address as they type. More advanced software proposes things that the user didn鈥檛 think about but would have done, like scheduling that meeting with Brian. The most sophisticated is software that introduces actions the user wouldn鈥檛 have considered, because they are designed to meet some larger organizational goal.
You mentioned security and trust earlier. How do you find that balance between providing useful insights and maintaining employees鈥� trust?
First, flexible privacy and compliance controls allow customers to protect their data. Organizational data is aggregated and deidentified. It鈥檚 adapted to country requirements. And the tools evolve based on what customers need. We do a lot of low-scale experimentation and we work hard to solicit feedback on how people are using the software and their reactions. We frequently change the words we use on prompts. It鈥檚 amazing how the same nudge, worded slightly differently, can be received differently.
There鈥檚 a real risk-reward equation that people apply to technology.
That鈥檚 true. People may inherently distrust the technology, but they start to feel differently if they鈥檙e getting value from it. That said, we need to earn trust by making sure that we鈥檙e not doing any of the things that people worry about. As we earn trust, hesitancy shrinks. But that鈥檚 not something you can do overnight. We think about it every day, with every feature. Because we know crossing that line is not easy to uncross. We want to help organizations and employees be empowered to spend time in the most useful ways, and as we do that, the value grows and grows.
About Horizons by SAP
Horizons by 51风流is a future-focused journal where forward thinkers in the global tech ecosystem share perspectives on how technologies and business trends will impact 51风流customers in the future. The 2020 issue of Horizons by 51风流focuses on Context-Aware IT, with contributors from SAP, Microsoft, Verizon, Mozilla, and more. To learn and read more, visit聽.
