What's new in Viva Insights - January 2024

Microsoft

Jan 24, 2024

New Teams channel and collaboration metrics

To help expand the set of collaboration activities measured by Viva Insights, 17 new metrics are now generally available. The metrics capture Teams channel and other collaboration activities including but not limited to: visiting a Teams channel; posting a message in a Teams channel; replying or reacting to a message; and number of weekend collaboration hours.

In addition, we have:

Updated existing metrics, such as Collaboration hours and Uninterrupted focus hours, to include Teams channels activities.
Created a workflow that helps analysts decide when to update existing queries, to prevent unexpected impacts on operationalized reports.
Updated all Power BI templates to benefit from the newly measured activities.

Teams channels are a key component of collaboration in Microsoft Teams, and measuring these new activities increases the accuracy and completeness of our metrics.

Analysts will find the new metrics in the Metrics library, and can use them in both custom Person queries and Power BI templates.

Here is the complete list of the metrics and their definitions:

Channel message hours: Number of hours a person spent posting, replying to, or reading Teams channels messages.
After-hours channel message hours: Number of hours a person spent posting, replying to, or reading Teams channels messages outside of working hours.
Working-hours channel message hours: Number of hours a person spent posting, replying to, or reading Teams channels messages during working hours.
External channel message hours: Number of hours a person spent posting, replying to, or reading messages in Teams channels with at least one other person outside the company.
Weekend channel message posts: Number of messages a person posted on Teams channels during Saturdays or Sundays.
Weekend channel message replies: Number of messages a person replied to on Teams channels during Saturdays or Sundays.
Channel message posts: Number of messages posted on Teams channels.
Channel message reactions: Number of reactions to posts and replies to messages on Teams channels.
Channel message replies: Number of replies to messages on Teams channels.
Channel visits: Number of visits to Teams channels.
Generated load – Channel message replies: Number of replies to messages posted by the person on Teams channels.
Generated load – Channel message reactions: Number of reactions to messages posted or replies to messages by the person on Teams channels.
External 1:1 meeting hours – Number of hours a person spent in meetings where the only other participant was an external person.
External meetings including manager – Number of meetings where a person and their manager met with at least one person outside of the company.
Meetings including manager and skip-level leadership – Number of meetings where a person’s manager and skip manager or skip manager’s peers also attended.
Time with leadership – Number of hours a person spent in meetings, emails, Teams chats, Teams calls, and Teams channels with people that are skip level or above up to six levels in the organization chart.
Weekend collaboration hours – Number of hours a person spent in meetings, emails, Teams chats, Teams calls, and Teams channels on Saturdays and Sundays.

Partitions general availability

Previously only available to private preview customers, we’re pleased to announce the general public availability of partitions in Viva Insights. Partitions are analyst workspaces that only contain certain employee data and attributes. In a partition, analysts can only create queries based on the data in that partition.

You can think of partitions like buckets. Each bucket (partition) contains a certain subset of data from the reservoir (your entire dataset, also known as the global partition). For example, one bucket might only contain data from employees who work in your company’s marketing division.

The Insights administrator assigns analysts to one or more buckets or partitions. When those analysts run queries, they can only pull from the data in their assigned partition.

Admins can turn on partitions in the Viva Insights privacy settings page. Learn more about partitions and how to set them up.

New Growth, Inclusion and Engagement Power BI report

We’re pleased to announce our new Power BI template, the Growth, inclusion and engagement report. This new report empowers HR leaders and analysts to support, engage, and retain talent throughout the employee lifecycle. 

This report addresses key moments in the employee lifecycle, allowing you to pivot the insights by any given attribute and focus on a specific cohort group of interest. This way, the report can be used for a multitude of workforce and talent management-related scenarios including career advancement, distributed teamwork, HiPo analyses, or analyses aimed at improving the experiences for talent with different roles, skills, diversity attributes or contract types.

This report empowers leaders to learn about people’s experiences throughout the employee lifecycle to help create an environment in which all talent can thrive. To encourage employee engagement and retention, and to guide analysis, the report includes five main business questions:

Attract talent: What attributes does the new talent pool bring compared to the current workforce?
Onboard new hires: Are new hires growing their networks and getting the manager support they need?
Develop and grow: Do employees receive enough manager coaching and visibility to leadership?
Promote career advancement: Are all cohort groups well-represented among leadership?
Boost engagement: What are potential drivers of engagement for different cohorts in the organization?

The report will be generally available by early February.

New query for analysts: Organizational network analysis (private preview)

We’re rolling out a new Organization Network Analysis (ONA) experience within the Viva Insights Analyst Workbench. This new tool enables analysts to conduct “in-depth” analysis of the repercussions on collaboration behavior following a change, such as a re-org, agile transformation, or shift in work modes.

The distinguishing characteristic of this experience is that ONA metrics are leveraged to surface pertinent insights within the context of a scenario. In this case, the scenario is Change management.

Specifically, the tool offers:

Guided workflow: Analysts can conduct scenario-focused analysis tied to a change event.
Relevant insights: As the analyst uses the tool, they are provided with specific curated insights pertinent to diagnosing the impact of the change on collaboration behavior.
Simple visualizations: Insights are surfaced through simple visualizations which are easy to interpret and comprehend.

The three differentiating traits of the experience are:

1. Side-by-Side network views which enables comparative diagnosis, like below:

2. Sub-group perspective for deeper exploration:

3. The combination of qualitative insights (via Network visualizations) and quantitative insights (through matrix and chart views) provide a complete perspective into the impact on collaboration behavior: