Microsoft's Surveillance Gambit

Awareness over Microsoft’s Productivity Score is slowly increasing. Most people have an inkling that Facebook and Google attempt to monitor everything we do,and it’s largely accepted. The deal is information in exchange for free services (and better ads). Most don’t realize just how much information those companies gather, but that’s a different post. 

The surveillance trend is now coming to work. Microsoft has a powerful tool dubbed the Microsoft Productivity Score. It tracks user activities and interactions across Office 365 (Office, Exchange, Edge, OneDrive, Yammer, and Teams) and compiles these behaviors into easily understandable leader-boards that show relative “productivity” of each employee. 

There’s definitely some good stuff here. For example, Microsoft can identify people who may be vulnerable to burnout, and employee well-being is a bit part of its initial launch. Of course, this is version 1. The app is going to get far more robust. 

What Microsoft chooses to measure will likely have a distorting effect on workplace behavior. Remember Goodhart’s Law: Any measure becomes a target and then ceases to be a useful measure. Also, this is both good and bad, but visibility is largely limited to Microsoft products. That means it doesn’t really track your Zoom meetings. That provides a nice refuge for some privacy, but can also cause a concern. For example, if the productivity tool determines that the best employees have 4.8 meetings a day, and some of yours are not accounted for, there may be some s'plain’n to do. 

Productivity is a bit of a misnomer. Microsoft is measuring activities, not quality.

There’s also a privacy issue here — a complex one, given that work data belongs to the employer. In every presentation on this topic, Microsoft is quick to say that it believes privacy is a fundamental human right. But what’s private here isn’t clear at all.

In the consumer space, privacy is better understood. If I don’t share something, it’s private. But that’s not the case at work. Email, conversations, documents, etc. belong to the employer. It is their data so they can analyze it. So this fundamental right of privacy is really to the employer, not the user. This isn’t changing. What’s changing is the visibility into employee interactions is increasing as are the tools to analyze and compare behaviors. Things we thought that were private will no longer be private. For example, working hours or how many times you hit backspace in an email before sending may become visible metrics. 

In some (European) countries privacy is far more protected legally, and I suspect Microsoft will have to disable this in some countries. Though if enabled, it’s not clear if that would be Microsoft or IT that is potentially breaking the law. In other words, it will be up to IT staff to determine whether this tool is legal. 

The data collection is presented as a tool for managers, but the data is also shared with Microsoft. The lure here is an industry-wide comparison feature. Employers can measure and compare productivity traits (meetings, working hours, etc.) to anonymized sector data. It will be a big day treasure trove. If employers participate in data sharing, that also means that Microsoft builds a database on company operations across numerous industries and regions — data it can sell, mine, exploit, or lose. 

There is some truth that Productivity Score is really just a reporting engine. To some degree, IT administrators can already track detailed productivity measures. Again, that’s a different post. For the most part, we don’t IT to have access to such personal content. IT can read each user’s email, but that’s a bad practice. We have developed tools and processes that limited/discourage such activities. For example, IT would have to reset a user’s password to read emails, and that leaves a trail. 

But Productivity Score is much more than what apps get used. It can provide details on who you interact with and in relation to what. For example, it might be interesting to see how collaborative team members are near a deadline. Who shares content, who revises documents, etc. Productivity Score will presumably even take note of things like sentiment, or constructive behaviors. 

What’s really key to Productivity Score is getting this information to the right people. IT doesn’t give out admin controls to HR and department leaders. Productivity score productizes this important data for business leaders (and employees themselves). That’s why this is so much different than what exists within IT already.

The data will get better and will undoubtedly get used in some interesting ways. For example, let’s take all the 1s (employee ratings) and see the frequency (and sentiment) of comms (calls, emails and Teams chats), and then compare that data to the performance of 5s. Perhaps there are some clear patterns. Perhaps we can even use those patterns to predict future performance. 

Basically, the types of detailed, keystroke measures that call center agents work under are going enterprise-wide. 

Productivity tracking is going to happen. The cloud connects everything. It was a big deal to figure out usage metrics to improve software. Now we are going up another level to behavioral patterns across applications. 

However, I’d prefer this monitoring to be more contained. Zoom had an attention-tracking feature that people found too pervasive. The feature was removed, but it was limited to Zoom meetings only. For an organization that’s heavily leveraging Office 365, there’s no escape from Productivity Score as it applies to all apps and all employees. There are more specialized applications. For example, the Prodoscore app provides analysis of communication channels, but it is typically contained to specific teams. 

This post is an extended version of content that first appeared in the November Insider Report available to paid subscribers. Subscription info here.

There were several articles on this in November. Also, see this Tweet Thread.