Analytics is one of the most important tools any business can access. They can provide insights into everything from product viability to operational excellence. One of the areas where analytics has the most significant potential is in the collaboration landscape.
Companies know a collaborative team is more productive, creative, and engaged than a distributed and isolated workforce. When staff members work together in a unified, synergized environment, they can share different perspectives, ideas, and information to solve problems faster.
However, while 75% of modern employees say collaboration is essential to success, 39% believe there’s room for improvement in their collaborative methods. This highlights a need to evaluate the collaborative ecosystem and pinpoint areas for optimization.
Collaboration analytics are the tools companies use to examine their teams’ performance, productivity, and unity to pave the way for rapid growth.
What is Collaboration Analytics? An Introduction
“collaboration analytics” is still relatively new to today’s evolving digital landscape. When defining this term, we should first note that “collaboration analytics” isn’t the same as collaborative analytics.
Collaborative analytics is an analytical process that harnesses the input and evaluation of multiple users in a collaborative setting. For instance, rather than relying on a single individual to leverage insights from customer experience data, a business might bring various sales, marketing, and product teams together to unlock different perspectives.
Collaboration analytics is a term that refers to the analytical tools and resources companies use to assess the benefits of their collaboration strategy.
As today’s teams become increasingly distributed and globalized, collaboration tools are emerging as the “central hub” for modern work. They bring team members together in an environment where they can share information, communicate, and work cohesively on projects.
Analytical tools built into these platforms can provide businesses with greater visibility into important collaboration metrics, such as:
- Productivity and performance
- Engagement or employee satisfaction
- How collaboration tools and meeting rooms are used
- Efficiency and how collaborative time is managed
- Which collaborative tools are accessed the most often
The Evolution of Collaboration Analytics
Tools for collaboration analytics essentially provide companies with valuable insights into working patterns, operations, and team performance. The ability to view analytical data in collaboration and productivity software isn’t entirely new. For years, app creators have provided administrators and business leaders with snapshot overviews of app utilization.
As collaboration becomes more complex, software vendors in the UCaaS field are beginning to introduce more advanced analytical abilities to their apps. Rather than just monitoring app utilization, companies can track various factors contributing to overall employee experience and productivity.
The evolution of collaboration analytics has prompted the formation of two specific areas of analysis within most analytical tools:
- Personal analytics: Insights individual users can access to understand their workflow and make productivity changes. These tools might provide insights into the number of hours spent in meetings, who the user interacts with most often, and which tools they typically use.
- Manager insights: Manager and supervisor-focused collaboration analytics tools provide a broader insight into the collaborative performance of the workforce. For instance, Microsoft Teams offers access to Workplace analytics. Here, business leaders can track app usage, meeting time, and average productivity scores.
What are the Features of Collaboration Analytics Tools?
The metrics and insights available from each tool for collaboration analytics can vary drastically depending on the vendor.
Workplace analytics in Microsoft Teams covers everything from call hours to the number of instant messages sent in a channel. The Manager Insights dashboard also allows managers to track specific metrics. These include productivity and engagement levels, without offering specific, personal data points on individual users. Microsoft also offers the “Productivity Score” feature, which provides a range of generalized scores for things like teamwork or mobility.
Alternatively, Microsoft’s MyAnalytics personal analytics app gives employees more specific views of their focus time, meeting times, and productivity drains.
Elsewhere, other companies have also introduced their versions of collaboration analytics tools with unique insights and guidance. Google Workspace has personal productivity analytics and organizational analytics dashboards for tracking broad and individual metrics. The “Work Insights” metric even shows “adoption insights” for the Workspace tools.
Cisco offers the People Insights analytics system for Webex, with three metrics geared towards organizational leaders, teams, and individuals. Even Slack has its analytical system. It’s designed to give customers more insights into how the messaging-based app is used in any organization.
Is Collaboration Analytics Problematic for Privacy?
As more vendors in the UCaaS and collaboration space have begun introducing collaboration analytics to their tools, concerns have been raised about employee privacy. One report from CSS found that around 46% of employees are uncomfortable with the prospect of an employer monitoring their productivity via digital tools when working from home.
When Microsoft introduced its Productivity Score analytics, people criticized it for providing too many “Big Brother” insights into the individual performance of each user.
Microsoft and other collaboration organizations responded to this concern by changing their technology to ensure data is anonymized at the individual level. This has led to the introduction two separate schools of collaboration analytics: one for the individual user and one for the business.
Today’s collaboration analytics tools only provide direct individual data to the person it’s related to. This allows each employee to maintain a certain level of privacy. Each user can track their specific productivity and performance levels. However, business leaders only get a general overview based on information from the entire ecosystem.
Is Collaboration Analytics Useful?
Despite a few concerns around privacy, collaboration analytics have proven to be a handy tool for both employees and employers. Individual team members can use their data to help them boost their productivity, and achieve their unique goals.
At the same time, with generalized and anonymized overviews of collaboration data, business leaders can pinpoint potential roadblocks. Admins and supervisors can track things like the adoption of new tools. This can determine whether their staff are spending too much time in meetings to help drive more powerful business outcomes.
