UPDATED 12:00 EDT / MARCH 31 2021

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Cisco wants to foster employee well-being with Personal Insights in Webex

Cisco Systems Inc. said today it’s bringing more insights to its Webex communications and collaboration platform that it believes will help people work smarter and combat burnout.

The networking giant announced People Insights on the second day of its virtual Cisco Live digital event, saying it will help Webex users set personal goals around their meetings, work-life integration, connections and focus time. It will be available from three perspectives, including Personal, Team and Organizational.

The Personal Insights, visible only to each specific user for privacy reasons, will make it possible to surface daily trends on how they’re using Webex. For example, it will offer insights around each user’s key collaborators and activities, enabling them to set up and monitor personal preferences for using Webex to collaborate.

The idea with these insights, Cisco said, is it will help people to decide when they should accept or decline and reschedule meetings so they are better able to meet their personal work preferences and goals.

Team Insights will be made available to each team member and provide a view of the patterns around the connections within that group. It will also analyze how the team is collaborating, and provide insights on each team member’s habits and work-life integration, while maintaining privacy at the same time, Cisco said. The idea is to create a stronger and more inclusive work experience for each team member.

For example, Cisco said, team leaders could look at what percentage of meetings are taking place outside the team’s preferred working hours. They also could facilitate stronger working relationships by making team members are connecting with the right people and other teams.

As for the Organizational Insights, these provide more of a bird’s-eye view of collaboration trends across the entire organization. That will help leaders to spot silos and identify teams that might benefit from extra support or more focus on inclusivity, Cisco said.

Fran Katsoudas, executive vice president and chief people, policy and purpose officer at Cisco, said People Insights is all about promoting well-being by helping users better organize their time. “People Insights help us to deliberately design our day, based on our priorities, personal preferences, and goals, to be at our best at work, at home, and with our teams,” she said.

Aragon Research analyst Jim Lundy said he believes it’s important for organizations to prioritize their employee’s well-being in work-from-home environments. “The number of work hours is on the rise and there is a growing feeling of ‘invisibility’ for employees who are less apt to engage virtually,” he said.

But fostering well-being will be easier said than done, analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE. He said Cisco was smart to realize that in the COVID-19 pandemic world people are relying more on collaboration tools, and so those tools, including Webex, have become a system of record for people’s interactions.

“Collaboration tools couldn’t do this before due to the high percentage of in-person meetings,” Mueller said. “But for a more holistic picture we will need more than just collaboration data. For instance, calendar and email is another key source for people insights.”

The People Insights feature will roll out globally in a phased approach throughout the year, starting with the U.S. in summer, Cisco said.

Photo: Cisco

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