Guest contributor |
Effective communication and collaboration are critical to driving strong performance and productivity in a hybrid working environment. Many people are unaware they can leverage data from within Microsoft Teams to support their analysis of employee productivity.
To understand if a hybrid working model is effective, it is important to first identify what best practice looks like across roles and departments. Reviewing optimal working profiles enables organisations to identify key metrics for measurement. This is exactly what our customer Osotspa did using our application, Analytics 365 Collaboration Analytics. The Thailand-based beverage firm used Analytics 365 to review its hybrid working policy, define best practice and prove that its business did not suffer after migrating to a hybrid working model.
Supporting managers of hybrid workers
Managing people in a hybrid context can be difficult, so it is vital senior executives can understand trends and employees’ working habits. By reviewing the communication habits of the most successful individuals or teams, managers can determine and encourage the optimal balance of daily and weekly collaboration for employees in different roles.
Key indicators, such as time spent in scheduled and recurring meetings, internal versus external engagement, video usage and meeting conflicts, can be reviewed alongside optimal working profiles to provide invaluable insight to managers. Employees in different roles may use the same performance indicators in various ways. For example, it could be that using video on calls is considered critical to building relationships both internally and externally. However, using video may be less important for certain teams, such as technical developers, so managers may prioritise encouraging them to interact via chat to facilitate quick questions and answers, and continuous alignment on projects.
Data from Teams can also help to manage managers. For example, it can highlight management styles, track one-to-one meeting metrics and direct report overviews.
Empowering managers in performance reviews
Adding quantitative data to a traditionally qualitative induction review, performance review or appraisal process can be very powerful. Adding facts derived from Teams can help to identify well-being dips and spikes, while also empowering managers to open discussions in a more meaningful way. The analytics can prompt conversations by providing a deeper understanding of how an individual operates in their hybrid-working world.
As an example, the analytics might reveal that an individual always used video for group calls in the past but now only uses video for their one-to-one meetings. A manager can interpret this data in a meaningful way based on their understanding of the role and the individual involved. This helps them to ask relevant questions that wouldn’t be possible without the analytics.
Analytics 365 provides detailed data on employee performance on Teams (credit: Tollring)
Keeping up with the pace of change
Teams is constantly evolving, and as more people turn to it to support their telephony needs, it will further transform hybrid working. Incorporating both mobile and traditional phone calling, analytics can deliver an even more accurate profile of how a person is working and enable managers to deliver better support.
The best way to digest information is to have access to insights rather than raw data. From our heritage in telecommunications analytics, our focus is on getting the right information to the right people at the right time without them having to search for it. A key benefit of Analytics 365 is its visual dashboards that present insights to the user without them having to be a data scientist. And, with our Teams Phone-focused solutions, including Analytics 365 Call Analytics for Microsoft Teams, supporting customer-facing hybrid workers to deliver excellent service every time is easier than ever.
The use of technology for hybrid working is still young and is developing all the time. To prepare for new technologies, organisations need to be clear on what hybrid working means for their business. They must also educate managers about what best practice looks like for hybrid workers and give them the tools they need to implement these processes.
The aim is to create a culture of transparency and have people supporting each other to be the best versions of themselves. You can’t do that without an objective data set that is applied in the context of your organisation.
Hilary Oliver is chief marketing and experience officer at Tollring