Cisco Enhances People Insights for WebexCisco Enhances People Insights for Webex
Cisco offers up help on beating burnout and other workplace issues with the help of meeting insights.
March 31, 2021
.jpg?width=1280&auto=webp&quality=95&format=jpg&disable=upscale "The dashboard for Cisco's Personal Insights")
Whether an enterprise is committing to a hybrid future or taking a long view on remote work, one thing seems to be clear: Being able to leverage workplace analytics and insights will help it assess employee productivity as well as deliver the best employee experience. To that end, Cisco today revealed enhancements to its People Insights feature for Webex, revealing three ways to gain workplace insights.
The People Insights enhancements will allow Webex users to view workplace analytics and information on a personal, team, and organization level via a private dashboard built in Webex, Jeetu Patel, SVP & GM of the security and collaboration business unit for Cisco, said during a pre-briefing ahead of the Cisco Live announcement. Previously, People Insights allowed users to create professional profiles, which were viewable from others within Webex. The three People Insights features are:
Personal Insights provide individual users with daily trends and interaction insight, like how many times they accept but do not attend meetings, multitask during meetings, or don’t share video, Cisco shared in a press release. Managers will not have access to insights at the individual level, to ensure privacy, Patel noted.
Team Insights provides each team member with insight into the team’s collaboration habits and identifies patterns between connections. Teams should be able to use this guidance to improve how they work, foster relationships outside of the team, and watch out for the collective wellbeing, Cisco said. Data is surfaced at the team level, to maintain privacy, Cisco said.
Organizational Insights provide a bird’s-eye view into an organization’s collaboration trends and patterns, allowing managers and leaders to spot silos and identify teams that might need additional support, Cisco said.
These People Insights enhancements will roll out in phases over the year, with initial availability starting with select U.S. customers this summer, Cisco said.
The need for more workplace analytics like these comes at a time when enterprises are seeing increased levels of productivity at the same time of rising burnout and fatigue among employees, Patel said. Is this happening because they’re participating in too many meetings outside of normal business hours? Organizational Insights will bring this insight, Patel added. Additionally, People Insights can help businesses support an inclusive workplace, allowing interaction analysis and the ability to course-correct by encouraging employees to speak to people outside of their core group and to bring in more diverse voices in meetings.
As more enterprises move forward with their hybrid work plans, workplace analytics will become increasingly important, Prachi Nema, principal analyst, enterprise communications at Omdia, told No Jitter. "Video fatigue is becoming a real problem …. However, we can't get away from video meetings completely," said Nema, noting that capabilities like the ones described above can help "strike a work-life balance" and be used to improve productivity overall. "There is a gap in the market to address this problem,” she added, “and Cisco is taking a bold but cautious step here.”
