Microsoft Tweaks Productivity Score Tool After Privacy Backlash

Microsoft decided to make some changes in its new Productivity Score feature for Microsoft 365 after receiving backlash that the tech was invading company workers' privacy.

The news comes as a relief for some people who expressed concern that Microsoft's Productivity Score, which measures the 'quality' of meetings based on individual employee body language, was too much.

To address these privacy concerns, the tech giant removed Productivity Score's ability for companies to view individual user data, reported GeekWire.

Aside from the privacy invasion that critics felt about sensors during meetings, the company also faced backlash for letting firms view how often workers interact with Microsoft 365 apps over a 28-day period, said a report from the Tech Republic.

How Does Productivity Score Work?

The tool assigns each user of a 365 organization to score up to 100 across different categories: communication, meetings, collaboration, and teamwork.This data could be viewed by admins, usually assigned as managers.

"Going forward, the communications, meetings, content collaboration, teamwork, and mobility measures in Productivity Score will only aggregate data at the organization level," 365's corporate vice president Jared Spataro said on Tuesday.

So now, all of the scores will only be available on an organizational level, and workers' usernames will not be displayed as individual scores, reported EndGadget.

"No one in the organization will be able to use Productivity Score to access data about how an individual user is using apps and services in Microsoft 365," he added.

Three other features weren't linked with the usernames to begin with - Microsoft 365 App health, network connectivity, and endpoint analytics. These features are only on the app to diagnose possible shortcomings in company IT.

The meeting feature also measured how workers in in-person and online meetings perform, and it can track via sensor if meeting attendees show speech patterns that are "consistent with boredom and fatigue."

It can also measure other parameters such as the number of people in the room, temperature, time of day, noise level, and/or facial expressions of meeting participants.

Microsoft Says 'Productivity Score' Meant to Understand Workers

The Productivity Score was first introduced by Microsoft in October 2019 to let companies understand how their workers adapt to different kinds of technology.

According to a patent obtained by Newsmax, it had a goal of avoiding "non-optimal meetings," which may be "unproductive at best."

Initially, Microsoft argued that this feature isn't a default for the system. It only made headlines about a week ago as reports on the tool surfaced saying managers can snoop on their employees.

"Over the last few days, we've realized that there was some confusion about the capabilities of the product," Spataro said.

He wanted to clarify that the system only produced a score of an organization and was not designed to assign individual user numbers.

The company did not comment on recent patent filings. There was also no indication that Microsoft is planning on launching a product from the said idea. That is a clear possibility as not all patents filed by companies get realized as products.