Microsoft IT Showcase
Major league productivity
with MyAnalytics
Hard work equals impact, right? Jace Moreno thought so, but his personal productivity metrics told a different story.
Microsoft employees are using a little data from MyAnalytics to go a long way toward maximizing individual and
team effectiveness.
Part I: The gut punch
“Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.”
— George Herman "Babe" Ruth, Major League Baseball player
Jace Moreno scanned his new productivity dashboard the same way he studies the dials on his fitness tracker. Except
unlike his fitness tracker, these numbers were shocking. His stomach sank.
It was his first time using Microsoft
MyAnalytics, a dashboard displaying a
week’s worth of his personalized
productivity data. His eyes lingered on the
number 23.4. That was how many hours in
a week he’d spent reading and writing
email in his Outlook inbox. He was
astonished.
“That’s roughly half my week I was
spending in email,” he thought. “Half!”
Then he noticed another startling number:
46, the percentage of his emails recipients
had opened and read.
“I felt nauseous, especially when I realized
I was spending more than half the hours
in my work week in email, and less than
half of the people I was sending mail to
were reading it,” Moreno said. “As a
result, I was also spending way too much
time in meetings and working after
hours.”
Figure 1. Jace Moreno – a high school quarterback, college baseball player,
and MBA graduate – knows plenty about hard work and results. But when
he started visiting his MyAnalytics dashboard, he was startled to see data
on how he spent his time and immediately started changing the way he
spent his work day. [Enlarge card]
MyAnalytics provides employees with
weekly summaries of data and insight about productivity, including how they spend their time, who they spend it
with, and details about time spent in meetings, email, focus hours, top collaborators, response times, and email read
rates. Each person and each job is different, so you can use the dashboard to set custom productivity targets based
on personal goals and what success looks like in each job.
To fully understand Moreno’s visceral reaction to his first batch of personal productivity metrics, you should know a
little something about him as a person. A former high school quarterback and college baseball player, Moreno is well
accustomed to performance feedback. He’s collaborative and hard-working. He is gregarious and growth-minded.
He’s responsive and communicative. In his first year at Microsoft after earning an MBA from Duke University, he had
every reason to believe he was being highly effective in his role leading Skype for Business in Australia. Yet to his
surprise and dismay, the numbers told a more complicated story.
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Major league productivity
“It was a gut punch of self-realization,” Moreno said. “That was the day that changed the way I work. I decided at that
very moment that I had to, and would, change.”
But how?
“Baseball would be a quite remarkable activity if it was the one place in the world where your coworkers didn't have any impact on how productive you were. But in fact, baseball is a high-stress
occupation, and those sort of stress-inducing activities have a huge impact on how the team
functions.”
—Bill James, baseball writer, historian, and statistician
Part II: Analytics, the game changer
In Michael Lewis’s book, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” the author followed the rise of the Oakland
Athletics circa 2001. With one of the lowest payrolls in the league, the California baseball team had trouble attracting
and retaining top talent—and therefore, they also had trouble winning enough games to make the playoffs. The
team’s manager decided to use an unconventional method to field a more competitive team: broad statistical
analysis. After all, what did they have to lose but games? By focusing on each player’s extensive personal performance
data, the A’s assembled a mish-mash of talented but traditionally undervalued players who—at least on paper—
would win games. The strategy worked, and it led the underdog team to the playoffs in 2002 and 2003. Oakland’s
data-centered approach flew in the face of baseball business as usual, but the data-heavy “Moneyball” approach went
on to change the way many teams operate.
More than a decade after this
experiment in Oakland, data analytics
are now helping people win in nearly
every aspect of life. We have
technology to track our footsteps,
sleep, calorie intake—even moods.
The democratizing of data analytics
changed the game of baseball, and
then our personal lives, and now the
workplace stands to benefit in much
the same way.
Like Moreno, many Microsoft
employees have started tracking their
personal productivity and changing
the habits they don’t like.
“I had too many meetings where I
was multitasking, which told me I
should reduce my meetings and
increase my focus hours,” said Israel
Arribas Santolaya, a technology
solutions professional in Madrid,
Spain.
Figure 2. Berfin Gökoglu, a Microsoft employee in Turkey, travels often for
work and has developed a talent for being productive from any given
coffee shop. “Still, I’m using MyAnalytics to try to decrease my work time
after hours.” [Enlarge card]
Berfin Gökoglu, a solution sales professional in Istanbul, Turkey, said she uses MyAnalytics as a reminder to stay
present and focused during meetings and to leave the emailing until afterward. She also uses it to track how much
she’s collaborating and communicating with key partners.
“It changed the way I work totally,” she said.
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March 2017
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Major league productivity
James Turner, an account executive for
Bing Ads, uses MyAnalytics to help
track the effectiveness of his
communication.
“I always felt that my relationship
wasn’t as strong with one of my
account managers. We didn’t meet as
often, nor did we communicate often
via email or Skype,” Turner said. “One
day I logged into MyAnalytics and saw
the ‘top collaborators’ view and it
confirmed my suspicion. I only worked
with this person about 10 percent as
much of the time as the others.”
MyAnalytics data is only available to
individual users, but Turner decided to
share this metric as a conversation
starter with the account manager, and
together they created a plan to
improve their communication and
collaboration.
Figure 3. “I’m using MyAnalytics to keep my calendar free from
unnecessary meetings to maximize my focus hours so I can do great work,”
said James Turner, a Microsoft employee in Chicago. [Enlarge card]
“Since then, our relationship has more trust than ever,” Turner said.
“One of the beautiful things about baseball is that every once in a while you come into a situation
where you want to, and where you have to, reach down and prove something.”
— Nolan Ryan, Major League Baseball pitcher
Part III: A whole new ball game
In high school, Moreno caught the eye of baseball scouts in search of talent to play in the big leagues. He was a
fearless third-baseman (and a double threat—he was also the quarterback of his high school football team). He had a
penchant for hard work that could, at times, border on obsession as he pursued and achieved his goals. Plus, he was
tall and muscular. He had the look.
“I’m a bigger dude, and when I met with the scouts they said I had what they called ‘the baseball body.’ I thought it
was hilarious,” Moreno said. “These guys are old school. Success is aesthetic for them—what you look like, how tall
you are, how fast you can run.”
Moreno may have had the look of a baseball star, but it was his work ethic that would earn him his success—a spot
on a college baseball team, an MBA from Duke University, and his job with Microsoft managing Skype for Business in
Australia.
The Oakland A’s revolutionized the sport of baseball with data analysis, superseding the scouts and their old-school,
subjective ideas of what an ideal player looked and acted like. Likewise, Moreno would revolutionize his entire
approach to work.
Out were the old hallmarks of what productivity was supposed to look like—stay planted at your desk, accept all
meeting requests, respond to email immediately, keep your status light on and available all day, multitask when
possible, and carry a phone or tablet to stay tethered when you must step away from your desk.
Moreno did extensive research on modern productivity best practices (recommendations on building goinformation
that will soon be incorporated into MyAnalytics). He considered his goals, his typical work day, and how he might
change his habits.
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March 2017
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Major league productivity
“The formula for success is pretty simple,” Moreno said. “Sticking to it is the hard part.”
He now tries to spend a couple of hours each day—usually first thing in the morning when his mind is fresh—focused
on his highest priority projects, and while he does, he closes his email and signs out of instant messaging.
“I can say this, even as the Skype for Business product manager—there should be times of day you’re not online,”
Moreno said. “You’ve got to have time to focus and get work done, and interruptions can take you out of it.
Productivity is not about doing a million things at once.”
Mid-afternoon, when he hits his typically
lowest energy point of the day, he spends
an hour “knocking out” emails. He is
careful about the meetings he accepts. He
uses IMs, rather than email, to quickly
resolve tactical issues. He tries to not
check email after 8:00 p.m.
One of his most important realizations?
That his responsiveness to emails is not
tied to his productivity at work.
“In fact, it’s exhausting. I felt tied to my
email account and got anxiety at times
when I couldn’t be checking it—in some
meetings, during personal time, even on
leave,” Moreno said. “I’m not saying it’s
not important, but it shouldn’t be the crux
of what I do. My productivity is tied to
how much value I’m adding to my
organization, customers, and channels.”
Figure 4. Stefanie Meister, a Microsoft employee in Germany, was surprised
when the data revealed just how much time she worked after hours. “I told my
husband about MyAnalytics and after that, tried not to spend so much time
working late. We checked [the data] together later. It worked.” [Enlarge card]
As Moreno started to change his work
habits, his metrics improved. Now, he
doesn’t spend more than 13 hours a week
in his inbox. The percentage of his emails
being opened and read more than doubled. He decreased the amount of time he works after business hours.
“Everyone wants to be productive. The trick is not for everyone to work exactly like me, but to consider their own best
practices,” Moreno said. “This self-realization is valuable on a personal level, but the impact it can start to have on a
team, organization, and culture is extremely powerful.”
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March 2017