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What just happened? Microsoft has responded to the backlash against its new Productivity Score tool in Microsoft 365 that essentially allowed managers to monitor employee activities. The Redmond firm is removing usernames from the role, which means companies will no longer be able to access information about individuals; instead, it will “only aggregate data at the organization level.”
Launched in October, the Productivity Score tool is turned on by default so that companies can track workers in Word, Outlook, Skype, Excel, and other Microsoft 365 services. It generates scores of 100 on 73 metrics, including quantity of emails sent per day, teamwork, number of times cameras are enabled during meetings, how often workers use chat and mentions in emails, and other intrusive details.
Having the equivalent of a manager sitting on your shoulder all day watching everything you do is not exactly an attractive prospect, although many companies are looking for ways to control employees who work from home. Wolfie Christl of the independent digital research institute Cracked Labs in Vienna, Austria, called the Productivity Score a “comprehensive workplace monitoring tool.” Microsoft claimed otherwise, but let’s face it, it’s hard to think of a better description.
Employers / managers can analyze employee activities on an individual level (!), For example, the number of days an employee has been sending emails, using chat, using ‘mentions’ in emails, etc.
Microsoft promotional video: https: //t.co/68sCJaFs9f
Via Heise: https: //t.co/hklmHtbF75 pic.twitter.com/Fabgi6koTN
– Wolfie Christl (@WolfieChristl) November 24, 2020
The protest appears to have caught the Windows maker by surprise, and it is now changing the tool to no longer include usernames, relying instead on “device-level identifiers.” Microsoft 365 Corporate Vice President Jared Spataro explained in a blog post:
“During the preview, we added a feature that displayed end-user names and associated actions for a 28-day period. In response to last week’s feedback, we will remove that feature entirely. Going forward, communications , meetings, content The collaboration, teamwork, and mobility measures in the Productivity Score will only aggregate data at the organization level, providing a clear measure of adoption of key features at the organization level. No one in the organization You will be able to use the Productivity Score to access data about how the individual user uses applications and services in Microsoft 365. “
“Over the past few days, we have realized that there was some confusion about the capabilities of the product. The Productivity Score generates a score for the organization and was never designed to score individual users.”
The move will undoubtedly be welcomed by workers, although Microsoft does not appear to have done with office technology similar to surveillance. A recently discovered patent by the company described an “informational computer system” that could monitor meetings and rate them based on body language, facial expressions, room temperature, time of day and the number of people in attendance.
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