Insights for managers
Important
This article is for the legacy Workplace Analytics app and does not reflect functionality available on the updated Viva Insights platform. Access current documentation for Viva Insights advanced insights here: advanced insights documentation.
Note
Only people managers granted access to Viva Insights in Manager settings can see their team's data in My team in Microsoft Viva Insights and in the advanced insights app.
As a people manager, you can get actionable insights about your team based on industry expert research. You can see how your team is currently getting work done and get suggestions on maintaining employee engagement, improving team collaboration, and increasing organizational agility.
You can use the following information to lead your team toward more effective business outcomes.
Employee experience - Research shows that happy employees help boost productivity and reduce turnover. These insights and suggestions can help you maintain positive employee experiences, such as evaluating how much time your team is working after hours on email or instant messages, and if your team is getting enough 1:1 time with you and other managers.
Team effectiveness - Nimble companies can more efficiently adapt to market changes and gain a true competitive advantage. The insights in this section show if your team has time to collaborate for rapid innovation, and to focus and produce higher quality work.
My team's data - Insights are scoped to your team's data, including employees who you directly or indirectly manage within your defined organizational group. The date range shows you the most recent Organizational data that's been uploaded to and processed in Viva Insights, including the current date range and the number of measured employees in your team. Your Viva Insights admin can give you more details about uploads and measured employees.
The following shows what your managers will see in My team in Viva Insights.
The following shows what your managers can see in the advanced insights app, which is the same information shown in Teams.
Manager access
To grant managers access to My team in Viva Insights and to Manager insights in the advanced insights app, your Viva Insights admin must add them as managers in Manager settings.
Note
By late June 2021, the app will no longer send an automated welcome email to managers who get access to My team in Viva Insights and to Manager insights in Advanced insights.
About the insights
The following describes how your team metrics are calculated to support the behavioral insights for each of the business insight questions. The metrics for Teams like yours shows benchmark averages about similar groups within the organization to compare with your team's metrics. These insights show where your team is excelling, and where you could lead change or improve upon.
| Business insight question | Team metric description | Metric average for your team and "teams like yours" |
|---|---|---|
| Are your team members getting enough time with their managers? | One-on-one time is the number of meeting hours with only an employee and their manager. To account for various meeting frequencies, the total time is calculated for each employee per month and averaged over a week. | The average number of hours that managers spend in one-on-one meetings with all of their direct reports. |
| Is your team working after hours? | After-hours work is the number of hours employees spend in meetings and on email outside of working hours. This uses the working hours set in the employee's Outlook calendar settings. | Average number of total hours a team spent in meetings and on email outside of working hours. |
| Is your team overwhelmed by email? | Employees that spend over 10 hours in email each week. Email workload is the number of hours employees spend sending and receiving email. | Average number of hours spent sending and receiving email. |
| Does your team have long and large meetings? | The number of employees that spend over 30 percent of their total meeting time in long or large meetings, divided by the total number of measured employees. Long meetings are those scheduled for more than an hour. Large meetings are those that involve more than eight people. | Average number of meeting hours spent by the team. |
| Does your team have time to focus? | The number of employees who have less than 30 hours each of available time for focused work, divided by the total number of measured employees. Focus time is when employees have two or more consecutive hours with no meetings. | Average number of total hours with two or more one-hour blocks of time where people had no meetings. |
| Are managers on your team connected across the company? | Manager cross-team connections are the number of departments outside your own that you had meaningful interactions with in the last 28 days. | An average number of meaningful connections the managers have outside their team. |
| Is your team collaborating across the company? | Cross-organization collaboration is the number of hours employees spend in meetings and email with at least one person outside of their own department. This insight highlights the organizations that spend more than 50 percent of their overall collaboration within their group. | Average number of hours the team spent collaborating with people outside their department. |
| Do your team members act as influencers? | Influencers are employees who have the best connections to people across the company based on their collaboration patterns. This insight accounts for the team's size and how it is represented within the organizational hierarchy for calculating the actual and recommended numbers of influencers in your team. | The average numeric scores indicate how well connected a person in that team is within the overall company. The higher the score, the more well connected that team is with the potential to drive change. |
| Is your team sharing information quickly? | One-on-one communication is the combination of email and instant messages (IMs) sent between two employees. This insight highlights the employees that spend less than 20 percent of their one-on-one communication over Teams IM. This is calculated as the percentage of one-on-one IMs sent, divided by the total number of one-on-one IMs and emails sent. | Average number of emails sent between only two employees. |
Supporting evidence and Best practices
Each insight includes Supporting evidence and Best practices that link you to related information, such as Microsoft Workplace Insights, which are authored by:
- Industry experts based on research
- Organizations that have effectively used Viva Insights to improve their business outcomes
Differential privacy
Differential privacy is a technology that allows researchers and analysts to pull useful information from databases containing personal information while simultaneously protecting individual privacy. This is achieved by introducing slight variations to the data to protect privacy while still maintaining accuracy, so managers have confidence in the observed values.
To learn more about differential privacy, see Differential Privacy in Viva Insights and Differential Privacy for Everyone.
View recommended plan
As a people manager, you'll also see an option to View recommended plan for each business insight. You can use this option to take immediate action for the groups listed in that specific insight. See Launch a plan.