Microsoft Corp. Tuesday made its new workforce productivity tool Workplace Analytics generally available, available as an add-on to the company’s enterprise-level Office 365 subscribers.

Ryan Fuller, general manager of Workplace Analytics, said in a blog post that Workplace Analytics taps into Office 365’s email and calendar metadata, sniffing out email recipients, subject lines and time stamps to provide greater insights into employees’ collaboration within an organization.

“It turns this digital exhaust—the data that comes naturally from our everyday work—into a set of behavioral metrics that can be used to understand what’s going on in an organization,” Fuller said.

Workplace Analytics was born out of Microsoft’s acquisition of VoloMetrix back in 2015. That company offers a big data processing platform that monitors usage of business and productivity applications, providing executives with more visibility into employees’ daily activities and collaboration patters. VoloMetrix says its platform offers a clearer picture of company’s corporate cultures, and providers insights into areas that could do with improvement.

Now its been wedded to Office 365, Workplace Analytics provides customers with a more integrated management toolset and user experience, Microsoft said.

For example, Workplace Analytics offers built-in compliance and privacy tools to ensure confidential data is kept secure. Metadata used by the platform is aggregated and anonymized, so companies can be sure they’re not violating any privacy regulations they need to abide by.

Fuller said he hopes that Workplace Analytics will serve as a decision-making tool for managers. For example, one early adopter of the platform drew on the insights gleaned from its calendar item tracking and analysis functionality to help with their office relocation. Using the platform’s findings, the customers was able to find new office space that cut employees’ travel times to meetings by 46 percent.

Workplace Analytics screenshot

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s own human resources organization has also benefited from using Workplace Analytics.

“Our HR Business Insights group is using Workplace Analytics across a variety of initiatives—from understanding the behaviors driving increased employee engagement, to identifying the qualities of top-performing managers who are leading Microsoft’s cultural transformation from within,” Kathleen Hogan, chief people officer at Microsoft, said in a statement. “We believe people analytics is a competitive necessity for any HR team.”

Image: Michael Kappel/Flickr