Delve Analytics, a Strong Add-on for Office 365

By Michelle Amodio
TMCnet Contributor

Users of Office 365 might see a surge in productivity thanks to a powerful add-on from Microsoft (News - Alert). Curious how much time you’re spending on email, or how many hours you’ve clocked working outside of normal business hours? Delve Analytics is here to help.

With Delve Analytics, Microsoft makes the argument that time and relationships are highly predictive of major business outcomes like sales, performance and overall employee engagement. It’s been likened to a FitBit, but for your work activities. Just as you can track health data with wearable tech, Delve Analytics tracks how much time workers in an organization spend on specific activities, whether it’s whittling down an inbox or attending meetings.

Delve Analytics isn’t a new thing; it was released in 2015. However the brand is only now revealing its true benefits to promote and boost its usage. All users need to do to activate the tool is visit the website http://portal.office.com, open Delve, and click Analytics from the left-hand side of the window.

Once it gets to know you, you can visually see how and when you spend your time at work. Delve Analytics provides information via the Office Graph, and these metrics are tracked by goals set by each individual. This gives a clear picture on whether employees are meeting objectives or not via graphs and the stats are displayed within the app. Users can also opt for a weekly report to be delivered directly to an email address that presents the key analytics.

Time feels intangible, which is why wasting it doesn’t always seem like a big deal. But it should: time is the only completely non-renewable resource humans have. Delve Analytics provides a picture of time-use data as it pertains to the workplace. Time-use data can be used to improve measures of how time is spent at work or while working for pay. Time spent at the “workplace” may not entirely consist of time spent in market work; it may also include time spent in nonmarket work or leisure.

Understanding and knowing this information is important because better data on time-use, while on the job, can help improve productivity measures.

"Most of what you see—such as how much time you spend in meetings or how long it takes someone to respond to your mail—is based on data you can already find in your mailbox," wrote Microsoft in an online FAQ. "Some of the information you see in your dashboard is based on what others are doing—like the average time people in your organization spend in meetings or how fast large groups are reading your email—but Delve Analytics presents this information in an aggregated form of reporting that is designed to protect individual privacy."