In November, Microsoft launched a tool for employers to see how much time employees spend on applications such as Microsoft Teams and Office 365. Productivity Score, however, allows employers to track the behavior of individual users. Privacy experts and security experts consider this an invasion of privacy and even speak of a "spy package. Several media outlets, including the Dutch edition of Business Insider and the U.S. business magazine Forbes, have outlined the concerns of privacy and security specialists.
Last month, Microsoft released a new tool that allows employers to objectively measure their employees' productivity. Productivity Score looks at how much time employees spend on Microsoft applications such as Outlook, Word, Excel and Microsoft Teams. For 28 days, this tool collects metrics to calculate a so-called "productivity score.
This score is composed of a large number of variables. For example, the software knows exactly how much time you spend sending emails in Outlook, how long it takes you to write a document or create a PowerPoint presentation, and how many messages you have received and what time frame you have responded to them. The tool also knows how often an employee turns their camera on and off during a meeting in Microsoft Teams.
Employers can map this productivity score company-wide and compare it to competitors working in the same industry or sector. Productivity Score, however, collects such detailed data from individual employees that managers can study work behavior at the micro level. This is set up that way by default.
"This is problematic in so many conceivable ways," Austrian security researcher Wolfie Christl wrote on Twitter. Managers monitoring employees at the individual level is a path he says we should not take. He also fears that if we accept this will soon be seen as the most normal thing in the world. Also, according to him, Productivity Score gives Microsoft a powerful tool, with which the company determines how organizations should function.
Christl describes Microsoft's tool as a "full-fledged surveillance tool for the workplace." He gets plenty of support on Twitter. David Heinemeier Hansson, one of Basecamp's founders, writes on Twitter that the word dystopia "is not powerful enough to describe the extent of the cesspool Microsoft has opened."
Bennett Cyphers, staff writer at the American advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells Forbes that Productivity Score permanently upsets the balance of power between employers and employees, creating a "toxic work environment." "I fear that when Microsoft rolls people into these monitoring dashboards, employees are going to find life with this level of scrutiny normal. And that managers will get used to having access to a nice data stream about their employees and this will be a boon to the industry," Cyphers said.
Microsoft more or less saw this hefty and fierce criticism coming. When announcing Productivity Score, vice president Microsoft 365 Jared Spataro already wrote in a blog that the tool is not a monitoring tool for employers. "Productivity Score is all about discovering new ways to work and providing great colleague collaboration and technology experiences," Spataro's blog reads.
A Microsoft spokesperson tells Business Insider that Productivity Score is an "opt-in experience" that gives employers insight "into the use of technology and infrastructure." It is emphatically not intended to monitor employees on an ongoing basis. "Insights are designed to help organizations optimize their technology investments. This is done by addressing common pain points such as long boot times, inefficient application collaboration and poor network connectivity. Those insights are aggregated over a 28-day period and are delivered at a usage level so that an IT staff member can provide technology support and assistance," the spokesperson said.
