Forum Discussion
Time investors vs Collaborators Directionality
Hi Kunaal! The directionality in group queries actually has nothing to do with who initiated collaboration. You can think of time investors as the "subject" of the measure, and the collaborators as the "object" that they are collaborating with. So if A spends an hour sending emails to B, it will show up as one hour of time that A invested in B. If A spends an hour in meetings with B, it will also show up as one hour of time that A invested in B. The special perspective of the group queries is that they view collaboration time as something that can be budgeted between collaborators, so if that same meeting is instead between A, B, and C, then A's time "investment" will be evenly split between B and C. But there's no consideration for who initiated the meeting or email.
I hope that helps to clarify!
kb2010
Thank you. Out of curiosity does thsi also apply to person to group query?
Also which i get these queries do not show directionality, doesn't sending an email imply directionality or even initiating a chat with someone? Are there any queries that we can see this directionality? the network queries do not go into detail about collaboration hours etc.
The person to group queries (using an hours-based metric) use the same time allocation logic. The only difference is that the assumption I mentioned above that "groups don't give time to themselves if other groups are present" doesn't apply, because the time investor in person to group is a person, not a group.
Directionality is available in relatively few metrics and reports in Viva Insights because the signal is not a reliable indicator of who is "driving" the conversation (especially for meetings, where the initiator is often just the first person with a few moments to get it scheduled on a calendar). However, there are a series of person query metrics called "generated workload" that do take directionality into account. For each person, they measure how much participant time (or how many instances) are associated with meetings, emails, and chats that they initiated. For example, if I invite three people to a one-hour meeting, I have "generated workload" of three hours.
Curious to know what specific research questions you are looking to answer using directional metrics, as it might be helpful as we think about future metrics to develop!