Скачать или смотреть Microsoft’s New ‘Productivity Score’ Lets Your Boss Monitor How Often You

At Microsoft’s MSFT annual Ignite conference in October, the company previewed a slick new tool called Productivity Score. During the virtual presentation, a senior product manager said the feature provides “insights that transform how work gets done” by showing employers how workers use Microsoft 365 services like Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive. Productivity Score officially launched less than a month later to little fanfare, but a closer look at what data Microsoft lets employers see about workers reveals a “privacy nightmare,” researchers and privacy advocates say. The workplace surveillance tool gives managers, for example, the ability to find an employee by name and see the number of hours they’ve spent in meetings on Microsoft Teams over the last 28 days. It also lets employers know the number of days a person was active on Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Skype and Teams in the last month and on what type of device. On a smaller scale, employers can even see the number of days a specific person sent an email containing an @mention or the number of times they had their camera on in meetings. There’s 73 pieces of granular data about worker behavior employers have access to, all associated with employees by name in a handy dashboard, according to Microsoft’s own documentation reviewed by Forbes.“It’s horrendous,” said J. S. Nelson, an associate professor of law at Villanova University who studies workplace surveillance. “Why are they monitoring people this way and what is that telling people about the relationship they should have with their employers in the workplace? What message are you sending?”Microsoft denies Productivity Score amounts to workplace surveillance, which is on the rise during the pandemic “Let me be clear: Productivity Score is not a work monitoring tool. Productivity Score is about discovering new ways of working, providing your people with great collaboration and technology experiences,” Microsoft 365 Corporate Vice President Jared Spataro said in an October 29 blog post officially announcing the feature. Productivity Score isn’t on by default, but when companies enable it, the program automatically shows data on individual employees. Employers can anonymize user data or opt out of using “people” data at all, but managers have to manually change those settings.“We make all of these choices available to customers and we’re super clear on how customers can use them or not use them,” said Microsoft 365 Product Marketing Director Melissa Grant in an interview with Forbes. Grant added that Productivity Score, which is available to any company with a Microsoft 365 or an Office 365 business subscription, aggregates user-level data for a period of 28 days, so managers can’t drill down and find out what programs an employee was or wasn’t using on a specific day or time.


All data is taken from the source: http://forbes.com
Article Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsa...


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