Microsoft 365 Is Not a Productivity Tool. Here Is What to Use It For Instead.
- Chris Gore
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Microsoft 365 measures activity, not productivity. Here is what the data is actually useful for and the question most organisations are not asking.
Chris Gore | Updated 2026
Imagine you come home and the builder's van is outside. Tools out. Radio on. Dust everywhere. He has clearly been going at it all day. You feel good about that. Hard work. Progress. Then you walk round the back and find he has been laying bricks in the wrong place for six hours.
Was he busy? Absolutely. Was he productive? Not even close. That is the problem with how most organisations are using Microsoft 365 data right now. They are measuring, but they are measuring bricks being laid in the wrong place. And they are not asking whether the extension is actually being built correctly.
What Microsoft 365 Actually Measures
The data Microsoft 365 gives you through Viva Insights, productivity scores and the admin portal is all activity data. Time in meetings. Emails sent. Chats sent. Documents opened. All inputs.
Productivity is not inputs. Productivity is outputs. Did the right thing get done, to the right standard, with the right person, at the right time? Microsoft can tell you that Sarah sent 47 Teams messages yesterday. It cannot tell you whether any of them moved anything forward.
When you start measuring activity and calling it productivity, you do not get more productive people. You get more activity. If meetings count, people attend more meetings. If email volume counts, people send more emails. If document edits count, people start making minor changes to documents. You have built a sophisticated system for measuring busyness.
What Microsoft 365 Was Actually Built For
Microsoft 365 is brilliant at communication, collaboration and file management. It was built to help people work together. Using it as a productivity scorecard is like using a speedometer to judge whether your journey was worth taking. The speedometer tells you how fast you are going. Not whether you should have made the trip in the first place.
The irony of Microsoft 365 productivity data is that the most valuable insight it can give you has nothing to do with individual performance at all. It is about collective patterns. And that is a completely different question worth asking. For a broader view of what Microsoft can track across your organisation, read our guide on Microsoft 365 employee monitoring.
What to Actually Use the Data For
Are we meeting too much?
If meeting hours are high across the board, that is a leadership problem. Not a laziness problem. The data tells you where to look. Not who to blame.
Is communication siloed by team?
If collaboration data shows teams working in isolation with no cross-functional communication, that is a structural and culture problem worth understanding and solving.
Are certain teams overloaded while others are coasting?
When workload distribution is visible in the data, management can act to rebalance. That is the data being used as a diagnostic on the system rather than a report card on individuals.
Where is the friction?
Long meeting culture. That is a leadership problem. Response time anxiety, people feeling like they have to be available at all times. That is a culture problem. Technology that does not work properly in meeting rooms, killing meetings before they have even started. That is a solvable infrastructure problem.
The Productivity Problem Nobody Talks About
You can get clarity on what productivity actually means in your organisation. You can fix the measurement problem. And there is still an issue that kills productivity, and it has nothing to do with the data.
If your people are spending forty minutes of a sixty-minute meeting trying to get the screen to work, that is an infrastructure problem. It will show up in your output data. But it is not a people problem. It is not a culture problem. It is a meeting room problem. And unlike long meeting culture or response time anxiety, it is entirely solvable.
SPORTrack monitors every AV device in every meeting room in real time. Problems are caught before meetings, not during them. See how it works. If you want to understand what your meeting room setup should cost to fix properly, use the AV pricing estimator to get a ballpark figure in under sixty seconds.
If the return to office context resonates, read how Chris Gore approached the same problem in Return to Office Mandates Will Not Fix Productivity, the Entrepreneur UK piece that covers the technology layer most return to office strategies are missing.
If You Want to Measure Productivity Properly, Check This Video Out.
Three things need to be clear before any measurement is meaningful.
What does output actually look like in your organisation?
Not tasks completed. Not hours logged. What are the things that, when done really well, actually move the business forward? Deals closed. Projects delivered. Problems resolved. Decisions made. Start there.
What is the quality threshold?
Not all output is equal. A sales call is a sales call. A well-prepared, well-run sales call that moves the deal forward is not the same as going through the motions. Defining what good looks like is a management job. Not a software job.
What is the environment doing to block output?
This is where technology plays a role. Meeting room technology that does not work. Collaboration tools that create friction. Workplace setup that makes it harder to do the job. These are infrastructure decisions. And they are the only ones on this list that are immediately fixable.
Get an instant AV pricing estimate tailored to your rooms |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Microsoft 365 a productivity tool?
Microsoft 365 is a communication and collaboration platform. The data it generates — through Viva Insights, productivity scores and the admin portal — is activity data, not productivity data. It can tell you how much is happening, not whether the right things are getting done.
What is the difference between activity and productivity?
Activity is inputs: emails sent, meetings attended, documents opened, chats per day. Productivity is outputs: did the right thing get done, to the right standard, by the right person, at the right time? Microsoft 365 can measure activity. Measuring productivity requires defining what good output looks like in your specific organisation.
What is Microsoft 365 Viva Insights?
Viva Insights is Microsoft's workplace analytics tool within Microsoft 365. It provides data on meeting habits, collaboration patterns, focus time and communication trends. The data is most useful as a diagnostic on systemic patterns — meeting culture, team isolation, workload distribution — rather than as a measure of individual performance.
What should I use Microsoft 365 productivity data for?
Use it to find friction in the system. Are we meeting too much? Is communication siloed by team? Are certain teams overloaded? Is meeting room technology failing before meetings even start? These are the questions worth asking. Not who is productive and who is not.
How does meeting room technology affect productivity?
If your people spend forty minutes of a sixty-minute meeting fighting technology, that is forty minutes of lost productive time that will show up in your output data. Meeting room AV that does not work reliably is an infrastructure problem that directly reduces organisational productivity. SPORTrack monitors every device in real time to prevent this.
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