Leaf&Core

Microsoft’s Latest Office Feature? “Productivity Scores” and Invasive Spying on Employees

Danielle from Leaf and Core
Reading Time: 6 minutes.
Microsoft Office 365 Logo, a 3D square-like shape next to the words "Office 365."

Microsoft informing users of how many days of the year they’ll be spied on, right in the name.

 

Working from home has been tough. In many, it’s revealed that the only reason we didn’t realize we had ADHD was that there were just so many distractions in the office to occupy your brain with. I always found it easier to read in a noisy classroom than a quiet bedroom. Now my home is quiet, and my brain has never been noisier.

Something like Microsoft’s new productivity feature terrifies me.

Frankly, due to distractability, I’ve been doing work at weird hours. Sometimes I’ll get more done from 8am to 10am than I do between 10am and 4pm. Other times that productivity kicks in at 6pm and I let it ride until 11pm. Working from home has broken our schedules, increased flexibility, and introduced new problems with focus at work. That’s why this was the absolute worst time for Microsoft to introduce a feature that tracks productivity and could lead to people losing their jobs during a pandemic.

Microsoft is introducing a new feature to their Office 365 suite of apps that allow managers to track their employees. They’ll be able to see what they’re working on, who they’re talking to, how many emails they’ve sent, if they’ve contributed to documents, who they mention in emails and the number of times they mention others in emails, and much more. The idea is to measure just how “productive” a team member is and help managers figure out if they interact with enough people to be vital.

It’s workplace surveillance to help multi-million (or billion) dollar businesses figure out who to throw out on the street based on their email habits. It couldn’t have possibly come during a worst time.

Tracking Workers

Amazon does a similar productivity tracking. Warehouse employees have to meet certain demands, shipping a large number of products in a short amount of time. That has lead to the Amazon employee problem of hurt backs and full bladders. Amazon workers don’t have time to pee during their shifts. Many carry around a plastic bottle as a result. They don’t have time to use the bathroom. Do you think they washed their hands before shipping your products?

For Microsoft, it involves tracking a whopping 73 different metrics. These include how often they turn their cameras on for meetings, the amount of times they contribute to shared documents, emails sent that reference other employees, how much and how often they use Microsoft’s apps, and many other measurements. Microsoft details the information they collect, and it’s downright Orwellian. All taken without the employee’s consent and used to judge them, possibly for promotions or downsizing.

“One way to crystalize [sic] just how creepy this scheme is is by imagining a person with a stopwatch and a clipboard sitting behind you. Meticulously recording how long you spend on each task, compiling a dossier on everyone doing the same, then reporting the findings to management.”

– David Heinemeier Hansson, Creator of Ruby on Rails and CTO of Basecamp

So Many Problems

It’s almost too difficult to list all the problems of workplace surveillance. Ironically, all of the efforts to measure productivity could actually hurt workplace productivity. It could also damage diversity at a company.

Stress

Imagine the example David Heinemeier Hansson listed above. Someone sitting behind you with a stopwatch and clipboard, measuring your activity. This is a digital version of that. Whenever I’m sharing my screen, I find I make far more typos than when I’m not. I hate “pair programming” because I get so stressed out with having to perform my job with a person sitting beside me, watching and commenting on what I’m doing.

Now imagine you’re working in a Microsoft Word document and you realize you need to advance your productivity score. You have to rush, but you also have to share the document with your team. If they don’t comment enough on it, you could face a lower productivity score. You’ve rushed the project and put it out there, hopefully someone comments on it, otherwise, you could find yourself jobless, and it’s so hard to find a job or cover expenses during the COVID pandemic. With so many people requesting unemployment, it can take over a month to get paid in some areas. Not everyone has the savings to keep their head above water until the unemployment checks come in, and even then, they’re a fraction of your income.

And now you have to rush to finish a Word document fast enough to keep eating.

Bad Work

Going back to the previous example, what if you do need to ensure your project has many collaborators? As anyone on the internet can tell you, the best way to get the correct answer to something is to post the wrong answer. Want to know what birds can’t fly? Create an alt account and answer, “Just ducks and penguins.” The response will be swift, pointing out species of ostrich, or the short “flight” of chickens. Plus, ducks can fly! What do you do if you need your project to have many collaborators?

Screw it up.

Spend the required time making it in Microsoft Word, ensure there are a few inaccuracies, and wait for others to correct you. Then just publish the doc. Your productivity score will go up, even though you spent longer making it. Gaming the productivity score will take more time away from actual productivity.

Different Work Styles and Roles

I’m a software engineer. Admittedly, when I’ve held more management-heavy roles, I certainly did more communication across teams. But mostly, I keep my head down and code these days. Having my productivity tracked via Jira burndown is stressful enough. I had a friend curse me out for even mentioning Jira on a Sunday! Fortunately most people understand that Jira point estimates are not an accurate measurement of productivity. But what happens when tech-unaware people are just looking at a Microsoft Productivity Score and see that many of their individual contributes aren’t very “productive?” They could have their noses to the grindstone, churning out product after product, but they’ll never seem as productive as the roles that require large amounts of collaboration like product managers.

This is a score that’s not dependent on what a person does. An individual contributor perhaps shouldn’t spend as much time collaborating as a product manager. Meanwhile, a lead engineer should spend more time working with engineers across teams, and less time writing code on one codebase. Different teams with different requirements will be judged the same way using Microsoft’s Productivity Score, and it’s going to make some teams look horribly unproductive through no fault of their own.

Arbitrary Metrics Designed to Increase Reliance on Microsoft Products

From a future training video:

Your coworker wants to send you a message over Slack. What do you say?

“No, I won’t use Slack, I get more social credit Productivity™ if I use Microsoft!”

Correct!

Microsoft’s new tools reward people for using their products, but it will also punish them for using competitors’ products. Do you prefer to do your writing in Apple’s Pages? Perhaps you like the collaboration-first nature and tree-based linking of Wiki pages for documentation? Working on a presentation with peers who prefer Google Docs? Too bad. If you don’t use Microsoft’s products, your Microsoft Productivity Score will suffer. Do you want to be passed over for a promotion? Because that’s how you get passed over for a promotion.

Save your money, Keynote users, you’re going to need a nice, cushy savings account if you don’t want to use Powerpoint.

Discrimination

Microsoft has a long history of sexism. Photo from a Microsoft Xbox party for their engineers.

I saved the worst for last. Many female employees often talk about how their predominantly male peers or managers do not pull them into decisions or take their advice. Their ideas are skipped over in meetings, only to be implemented after a man brings it up, they face interruptions, they’re not invited to unofficial social gatherings, and they miss out on collaboration enough as it is. As a result, they’d score lower on communication and collaboration, through no fault of their own. Black, queer, and other marginalized groups report the same problems, and it’s compounded across intersectional identities. Microsoft’s tool has hidden racial, sexual, and anti-queer bias. In industries like tech, the software could even reinforce ageist discrimination.

Microsoft, like many large (predominantly white and male) companies, did not think of the hidden bias and discrimination in their tools. The result will be decisions made that compound racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, and other forms of discrimination. Microsoft’s new “Productivity Score” will increase unemployment among marginalized groups, while making it even harder to move up in companies than it already is.

Microsoft’s Defense

“We are committed to privacy as a fundamental element of productivity score. Let me be clear: productivity score is not a work monitoring tool. Productivity score is about discovering new ways of working, providing your people with great collaboration and technology experiences … For example, to help maintain privacy and trust, the user data provided in productivity score is aggregated over a 28-day period.”

– Jared Spataro, VP for Microsoft 365

The idea that just because you track employees only on a monthly basis is respecting their privacy would be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous. You cannot track a person on an individual basis without violating their privacy. Perhaps if the productivity score was used on a team-level, and then only for teams with 10 or more members, it wouldn’t be too much of a privacy violation. The are metrics that measure team performance on Microsoft’s tool. However, managers can then drill down and see who is bringing the team down. Since other people can be responsible for parts of your score, that can be a scary position to be in.

The only productivity score managers should be worried about are teamwork and results. Those can be measured on an individual basis and through peer reviews, not through a process that has hidden bias and micromanages employees.

Big Brother is Watching You

Hey, managers thinking about implementing this. Today, it’s being used to manage your direct reports. Tomorrow, your boss is using it. CEOs, think you’re safe? Do you really think you could compete with the productivity scores of those under you? Think the shareholders or board of directors will care about your “experience” or “attitude” when a score tells them some other employee or a CEO from another company would be better for them?

I cannot stress just how bad it is that Microsoft would introduce this, not only during a deadly pandemic, but when productivity has been hurt by that pandemic for many people who cannot be as productive at home. Not to mention the obviously problematic discrimination it will introduce and exasperate within companies. This is so anti-worker, I believe office workers should unionize to protest its implementation at companies. It wasn’t right when Amazon implemented this, forcing their employees to forgo bathroom breaks, it’s certainly not alright now either.

At the end of the day, do you really want to put your entire livelihood in the hands of Microsoft?

Yeah, me neither.

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