While employees report strong productivity and are hesitant to return to the office, leaders are struggling with the lack of visibility into what is actually happening across their organizations. 

Effective decision making, prioritization and execution differentiates successful leaders, but accomplishing this amidst evolving workforces, limited budgets, dysfunctional reporting, and competing workstreams increases complexity. Additionally, the compounding market impacts – pandemic, geopolitical conflict, supply chain, inflation – put pressure on margins and require executives to balance the needs of employees, shareholders and customers.  To effectively achieve goals and keep up with the pace of transformation that was required during the pandemic, leaders need a clear and reliable understanding of the inner workings of their organizations. 

The productivity paradox of hybrid work: A divide between employees and leaders 

Microsoft’s 2022 Work Trend Index Report: Hybrid Work Is Just Work. Are We Doing It Wrong? (microsoft.com)” indicates the rise of “productivity paranoia” where employers are questioning the productivity of their hybrid and work-from-home employees. The divide is staggering: 

• 87% of employees report that they are productive at work.
• 85% of leaders say the shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive. 

 While 82% of business decision makers say getting employees back to the office is a concern in the coming year, the fact is that people now expect flexibility and autonomy around how, when, and where they work. 

 Without the ability to observe employees’ physical presence in the office, leaders and managers may miss the traditional visual cues that used to indicate productivity. To adapt to this new reality and effectively manage their modern workforce, it is important for organizations to have access to empirical data that they can trust to understand and shape the modern workforce.  

Accessing rich productivity insights with Microsoft Graph Data Connect and GainX 

The hybrid working world has dramatically accelerated digital investments that reimagine and reshape how modern work gets done – leading to more collaboration online than ever before.  

Sitting across digital platforms like Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and more, is rich productivity data – millions, if not billions of data points into how your teams connect, communicate, work and collaborate. 

With Microsoft Graph Data Connect, you can quickly access and extract your Microsoft 365 data at scale, in a secure and privacy compliant format. And through our collaboration with GainX, an Enterprise AI platform, your rich productivity data turns into proactive insights for data-driven executive decisions.  

Predictive, actionable insights designed for today’s executive 

 Microsoft teamed up with GainX to ensure leaders can make the most of their productivity investments, by leveraging powerful AI-driven insights that accelerate strategy, transformation and enable high-performing workforces.  

GainX Artificial Intelligence leverages advanced Social Network Analysis and Anthropology to thoroughly analyze the relationships, work and activities within an organization. By incorporating data from Microsoft 365, GainX is able to construct a comprehensive map of information flow and provide a data-driven, systemic view of how an organization is actually functioning. The algorithms and dashboards found in GainX have been purposefully designed and built with executives and leaders in mind, ensuring that they are equipped with the critical and relevant insights and support to make effective, smart, and informed decisions. 

By combining across data sources including Microsoft 365 productivity data, GainX provides data-driven, actionable insights that can help leaders to:  

• Boost productivity and enhance the culture and connectivity among employees 
• Align groups and programs with corporate strategies 
• Eliminate duplicate work to immediately save costs and reposition resources to critical at-risk work 
• Prioritize and forecast the potential success or delays of strategies and programs 
• Optimize or rearrange resources in a way that empowers employees to succeed and deliver effectively 

Teaming up with GainX: Why Microsoft is working with GainX AI to help customers harness the power of their productivity data

It is not possible for the human mind to process the millions of data points in an organisation today in order to take highly strategic, informed decisions at pace. GainX AI and Microsoft Graph Data Connect offer a solution to quickly and securely extract relevant, timely data in a privacy-compliant format and GainX AI providing critical, predictive insights, actions, and recommendations for leaders. This gives leaders a substantial competitive edge, and allows them to make data-driven decisions with speed and confidence. 

 Uncover Insights at Scale: View unexpected dependencies hidden across business units, functions, teams, work and programmes, right now. Through M365 data, GainX surfaces the organic nature of the flow of critical and strategic information through an organization, and how it changes with strategic shifts, behavioral shifts (like change fatigue), growth, market shifts, and more.  

Unbiased: GainX dashboards and insights are based data that is collected automatically, ensuring that the data is accurate and unbiased (not manually submitted with potentially biased perspectives). This allows for objective decision-making. 

 Comprehensive Security: Microsoft protects sensitive data and reduces risk exposure. Our security and governance capabilities come ready to use out of the box. You can specify detailed compliance policies for applications to use Microsoft 365 data. To Learn more about Microsoft’s Security and Governance capabilities: Security, governance and privacy built into Microsoft Graph Data Connect – Microsoft 365 Developer Blog 

Greater Governance & Predictive Risk Management: GainX provides executives with a comprehensive and predictive lens into initiative execution and outcomes when Microsoft 365 productivity data is combined with organizational project data in the GainX platform. Leaders can improve outcomes and performance with proactive approaches to risk solutioning. GainX surfaces insights not visible to the human eye, at speed, including programme delays, distraction, burnout, dependencies in communications, information flow, and capacity.  

Maximizing productivity and governance with GainX: A case study of a global bank 

 Let’s now take a look at a global bank that was able to do more with less around governance and productivity improvement. To give you a sense of scale, the customer is:  

• Operating across four countries   
• Has nearly $900M strategic budget spread across 600 projects 
• Over 5,000 employees 

With GainX, they were able to identify:  

• 800+ underutilized resources for consolidation or re-allocation, creating additional capacity with existing talent to increase support on more valuable, high impact work, providing greater utility of existing personnel. 
• 27% of employees were isolated, distracted and/or blocked from the critical information they required to do their jobs effectively, creating $29M in productivity losses and impacting the delivery of strategic programs.   
• 20% in costs benefits identified across a nearly $900M portfolio including $38M in duplicate work, immediately allowing resources and capital to be re-allocated. 

Conclusion 

In order to navigate the rapidly changing economy and keep up with the increased pace of change, executives need trustworthy insights into the communication, connectivity, and performance of their organizations. Microsoft Graph Data Connect and GainX quickly and securely transform existing, rich productivity data into proactive, data-driven insights for effective executive decision making. By thoroughly analyzing relationships and activities within an organization, GainX Artificial Intelligence powered by Microsoft Graph Data Connect helps leaders to optimize their modern workforce for success and deliver transformative strategies efficiently and effectively. 

Next steps 

Take advantage of the GainX and Microsoft collaboration to transform your organization’s productivity data into data-driven insights for effective executive decision-making. Schedule an intro

Hannah Cawthorne: GM Sales & Partners – GainX Hannah.cawthorne@gainx.com  | +44 7583 106797 

For additional questions, please reach out to the Microsoft Graph Data Connect team.