Microsoft MyAnalytics

What is Microsoft MyAnalytics?

Microsoft MyAnalytics is a personal analytics application in Office 365 that enables employees to gain insights into how they spend their time at work and how they can work smarter. MyAnalytics also allows employees to stay updated with important contacts; share key metrics with a supervisor, manager or coach; and prioritize the time they spend with different groups.

MyAnalytics is a productivity app for workers who are already using Office 365 or Microsoft Outlook. Applications like MyAnalytics are welcomed in some human resource circles where the goal is to make employees productive and efficient in the workplace. It benefits teams and individuals by using analytics about worker tasks to improve everyone's work and speed.

The application provides data-driven insights about time spent at work through elements that are accessible in both Microsoft Outlook and through all standard web browsers. These elements include the following:

• Dashboard. It enables users to view their work patterns, such as time spent on focused work, time spent in meetings, email practices and time spent in networking. It also provides tips on how to work smarter, rather than harder.
• Outlook add-in. It provides actionable insights in Outlook that enable users to keep up with and complete more tasks.
• Email digests. Each digest highlights the user's work patterns in a weekly email.
• Inline suggestions. Driven by data and AI, these suggestions appear in Outlook when the user is reading or composing an email (or a meeting invitation).

Users get access to these elements depending on their Office 365 plan. MyAnalytics uses data that's already available in a user's calendar and email.

What is the MyAnalytics dashboard?

MyAnalytics can develop reports and dashboards based on a worker's productivity. The dashboard displays information about the user's work habits over the previous four weeks. It consists of four sections:

• Focus. It shows how much time the user was able to focus on work outside meetings, emails, chats and calls.
• Well-being. This section shows how many days the user went without working outside regular working hours. Hours outside the work day are labeled "quiet hours."
• Collaboration. From this section, users can understand if the time they spend working with colleagues -- via meetings, chats, calls or emails -- could be more productive.

How does Microsoft MyAnalytics work?

MyAnalytics calculates work time (time available to focus) if the user blocks out time on the Outlook calendar to get work done. If any time is marked as "Out of Office" on the calendar, MyAnalytics won't include it when calculating focus time. The statistics in the Well-being section are intended to help users recharge from work and disconnect when required to maintain overall well-being at and outside work. The section visualizes this date through a pie chart of disruptions to quiet hours and which activities were the cause of those disruptions.

The Collaboration section provides statistics and graphs about the user's meeting habits, how often they open emails and chats during online meetings, and how many emails they sent and read during the previous four weeks. The goal is to help users understand whether they are spending their time productively or wasting it on unnecessary tasks.

The dashboard also includes a network section where a user can see how many people they collaborated with in the previous four weeks and in the previous 12 months. They can also add important people, inside or outside the organization, to get deeper insights about collaborations. Such visibility enables users to do the following:

• Proactively manage their network.
• Take appropriate action (e.g., mark some contacts as "important").
• Ensure that both parties are updated on the latest project status.

Sharing metrics and prioritizing time spent in groups

MyAnalytics allows users to share their analytics with others so both parties can stay aligned on work priorities. Sharing metrics and snapshots also enables users to ask for coaching on work habits from a mentor.

MyAnalytics also provides insights into the way a person works with groups in the organization. They can track the time spent on a project or team to increase the focus on top priorities, set group-specific goals and set targets for the most "important" groups. Adding a group to the MyAnalytics dashboard will provide these insights into the time spent collaborating with that group.

What is data privacy in MyAnalytics?

MyAnalytics always processes information in a way that employee privacy is always protected. To this end, it doesn't enable employee evaluation, tracking, profiling or monitoring. All employee-specific data is processed and stored in the employee's Exchange Online mailbox, and no employee can access new personally identifiable information (PII) on their co-workers.

The application also reminds people that their data is private and secure. Organizations can configure MyAnalytics so that individuals must purposefully opt in. The application also supports compliance with local regulations, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Union's main digital privacy protection legislation.

Accessing and turning off MyAnalytics

Any user can opt out of MyAnalytics and completely turn it off from the Settings link under the MyAnalytics page. By turning it off, the user will no longer receive insights about their work habits and patterns. From the same link, they can also toggle the dashboard on or off, subscribe to the weekly digest email and get the Insights Outlook add-in.

Access to MyAnalytics requires a subscription to Office 365. Once the user is signed in to Office 365, the dashboard will include a link to the MyAnalytics portal. The app can also be accessed via the MyAnalytics Outlook add-in. The add-in appears as a "pane" in Outlook and is automatically enabled for all users who have the MyAnalytics license. The add-in can be accessed by navigating to the Outlook toolbar and selecting the MyAnalytics logo.

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