Organization insights in Viva Insights

Article
04/15/2024

Important

Some of the features described below are for private preview customers only. Features in preview might not be complete and could undergo changes before becoming available in the broader public release.

Organization insights help leaders and managers build high performing teams. Leaders and managers can see key indicators of their organization’s wellbeing, productivity, and team culture, and they can find features and tools to help support their teams.

Subscriptions, roles, and access

To view organization insights:

You need to have a Viva Insights subscription (that is, a premium license).
To view organization insights for your team (direct and indirect reports), your Insights admin needs to assign you the Group Manager role in Viva Insights. And, you need to have a number of direct and indirect reports that meets or exceeds the minimum group size your Insights admin set.
To view organization insights for the entire company, your Insights admin needs to assign you the Insights Business Leader role.
You can also view organization insights if you're given "delegate access" by a group manager. See how delegate access works.

People in your organization also need to have a Viva Insights subscription so they can be measured in organizational insights. These employees are referred to as "measured employees." If you want to see an insight that reflects your entire company, everyone in the company needs to have a Viva Insights subscription.

Insights by role

People with the Insights Business Leader role assigned to them can access organization insights that include every measured employee in their tenant.

People enabled as Group Managers can access organization insights that include people who report to them directly or indirectly. Your Insights admin maintains this reporting hierarchy. If your admin assigned you the Insights Business Leader role and also enabled you as a Group Manager, you can toggle between the two organization insights views.

Data and privacy

Viva Insights commits that no user will discover information about another identified individual that they couldn't already know. This principle applies to every feature in Viva Insights, including organization insights.

For further detail about privacy and organization insights, refer to our privacy information.

Using organization insights

Note

If a group manager gives you delegate access to view organization insights, you can’t see the manager’s personal insights.

Organization insights are divided into two sections: Team insights, which are focused on your organization and teams; and Your insights, which are focused on your own personal working habits and productivity. Let’s start with looking at Team insights.

Team insights

The Home tab

Organization insights are more than just a dashboard—they also provide helpful features to share insights and actions with your organization. Here's what you might see in the Home tab when you open your Viva Insights app:

In the Home tab, you’ll find cards for reports covering different types of trends across the groups you manage, such as new hire onboarding and external focus. Each of these cards corresponds to a broader report, which you can explore further by selecting it from the list on the left. Or you can select the card itself to dive deeper.

Learn more about these new reports for leaders.

Underneath the report cards, you’ll find a section for Recommendations. These point you to other workflows in Viva Insights that can help support you or your organization manage the measured behavior described in the above reports.

Here's an example:

Let's say an insight shows people's meeting time has significantly increased. The insight card might contain a button to set up a plan. When you select the button, Viva Insights takes you to the no-meeting day plan to help folks dedicate a full day to their independent work.

Finally, the Home tab also includes relevant news articles that can help you manage your team and improve your organization’s productivity.

The Library tab

The Library tab, meanwhile, provides a snapshot view of various other metrics related to team collaboration, such as collaboration time and uninterrupted focus hours. In the Library tab, you can also filter these insights based on specific teams and time periods.

Let's take a look at how to use these features:

Scope information

At the top-left, an indicator shows how many people the insights are measuring.

The measured group reflects people who:
- Are in your reporting hierarchy, based on the organizational structure that your Insights admin maintains.
- Have a Viva Insights subscription (that is, a premium license) applied to their account.
- Employees were active in Outlook or Teams during the past 12 weeks.
People need to meet all of these criteria to be part of the measured group reflected here—that is, your scope.

If you're enabled as a Group Manager: On the left, select the dropdown menu to toggle between viewing insights for your organization, or different subgroups within your team. Teams with less than the minimum team size will be colored gray and their insights won't be visible.

Screenshot of the "Your organization insights" drilldown section for group managers.

If you have the Insights Business Leader role assigned: You can view insights only for your entire company.

Screenshot of the "Your organization insights" drilldown section for Insights Business Leaders.

If you're enabled as a Group Manager and you're an Insights Business Leader: You can use the toggle to view insights either for your team and subgroups, or for the entire company.
Time filter

You can view insights for the most recent week, 4 weeks, or 12 weeks of available data.

Screenshot of the "Your organization insights" time filter.
Benchmark

Use the benchmark toggle to compare your insights against previous time periods, peer groups, or the company average. Your benchmark options will vary depending on your assigned role and the time filter you selected.

If you're enabled as a Group Manager: If you selected a 1 week or 4 week filter, you can compare your insights to the prior week or prior 4 weeks for your organization.

The sample screenshot below shows the Benchmark results (highlighted) for the prior week for your team.

Screenshot of the "Your organization insights" prior week benchmark.

Or, you can compare your insights to your company or your selected peers' team, for the same filtered period.

If you selected a 12 week time filter, you can only compare results to either your peers' teams or your company, for the same time period.

If you have the Insights Business Leader role assigned: You can only set 1 week or 4 week prior time periods as your benchmark. If you selected a 12 week time filter, you can't select a 12 week benchmark.

If you're enabled as a Group Manager and you're an Insights Business Leader: You can select any of the benchmark options described above.
Details

Select the card itself to dive deeper into the measured results. When you select the card, Viva Insights brings you to the insight drill-down page. This page contains information like trend lines, peer comparisons, comparisons across groups within your organization, and distributions.

Note

About comparisons across groups: if a team that reports into you doesn't meet the minimum group size set by your Insights admin, then granular data for that team won't be available.
Three-dot menu for sharing

Sharing is available for most insight cards. You can share an insight in one of two ways:
- As an image - Select the three dots at the top right, then select Copy as image. You’ll see a preview of a screenshot of the insight. Select Copy image to clipboard. You can then paste and share the image with anyone, anywhere you want, such as in an email message or on Teams.
Screenshot that shows how to share an insight as an image.
- In a Teams chat – Select the three dots at the top right, then select Share via Teams. When you share through a chat, you'll have the option to add a custom message. You'll share the insight as a screenshot.
  
  Screenshot that shows sharing an insight via Teams.

Insight drill-down page

If you want to dive deeper into an insight, select the insight card. You'll arrive at a report page, which gives you more information about the metric that your insight's based on.

Here's what you can do on each report page:

Weekly averages

Your organization or company

Depending on the metric, view an average count, hours, rate, or size here. For example, if you were viewing information about uninterrupted focus hours, you'd see how many hours on average people in your organization kept for focus time without interruptions every week.

This number includes everyone in your reporting hierarchy or your company, depending on how your scope toggle is set.

Peer organizations

View this metric's average for peer organizations—that is, groups near your own group in your company's reporting hierarchy. Read more about peer organizations in Helpful terms.

Higher or lower than previous weeks

Below the weekly averages for your organization and peer organizations, find out whether this average is higher or lower than the week before last.

Suggested actions

The report suggests an action related to the metric you're viewing. Let's say you were viewing details for Long and large meeting hours. The report might suggest starting a no-meeting day with your team to block out days for individual work.

To get started, select the button, like Set up plan. Viva Insights then guides you through a setup process in the Viva Insights app.

You can also copy a link to the insight or share through a Teams chat here.

Trend graph

Learn how your selected metric averages have changed over time. View a four-month distribution of averages for:

Your whole organization (that is, your company).
Peer organizations.
Groups within your organization (that is, different reporting hierarchies within your company).

When you first open the report page, only three lines load on the trend graph: Your whole organization, Peer organizations, and the reporting hierarchy you're part of (for example, Emily Braun's organization).

To add more organizations to your trend graph, select the eye icon under Show trend. The trend graph only supports 20 organizations. To protect individual privacy, we don't show organizational insights if your organization is smaller than the minimum group size.

You can sort by any of the headers in the Groups within your organization table. For example, to sort by the number of people who were active on Teams or Outlook for that week, select the Active count header.

Snapshot from last week

View an insight about employees related to this report's metric. Let's say you're viewing the Long and large meeting hours report page. Through this snapshot, you might learn that 80% of employees spend more than half of their meeting time in expensive meetings.

Percentage of your organization

See a distribution of employees related to this report's metric. For example, on Uninterrupted focus hours report page, find out what percentage of employees in your organization get 0-10, 10-20, 20-40, and 40 or more uninterrupted focus hours per week.

How it's calculated and Why it matters

Learn how Viva Insights calculates the metric this report focuses on, and why it's important to pay attention to this metric. For a list of metrics related to organization insights, jump to Metric definitions.

Browse insights about other metrics related to the one you're viewing on this page. If you're viewing Long and large meeting hours, you might find Join on time rate, Multitasking hours, or Recurring meeting hours here. Use the arrows in this section's top-right to scroll through all related insights.

Your insights

Here, you'll find personal insights related to three key areas to help boost your productivity:

Wellbeing, to help you understand your work habits, manage your time, and improve your focus
Productivity, to learn more about your meeting habits and best practices for effective meetings
Teamwork, to understand how you collaborate with others, identify your top collaborators, and strengthen connections with your team

To learn more about how to utilize these types of insights and improve the way you work, visit our support site for personal insights.

Helpful terms

Current period – Unless otherwise stated, most insights are showing the result for the most recent period—that usually means the most recent complete week of data. A few insights use a four-week or rolling four-week window instead, to smooth normal variability and make it easier to understand the insight. If an insight uses something other than the most recent week for the current period, you will see it called out on the insight card.
Employees – Organization insights provide measures for groups of employees, and are meant to capture what typical workday activity looks like for those employees. To avoid skewing the averages by including people who are not at work during the week (for example, they are on holiday or out sick), organization insights only measure people who have some activity in Outlook or Teams during the week.
Organization breakdown – The groups displayed in the organization breakdown are based on your reporting hierarchy, which your Insights admin maintains. Each group includes people who report directly or indirectly to a person who reports to you. The insights represent the activity of the group, not just that person who reports to you, even though their name is used to label the group.

Insight Business Leaders who are viewing the insights for the entire company will see the organization breakdown by organizations reporting to top-layer leaders.
Peer organization – Peer organization includes groups near your own group in the reporting hierarchy. If available, the peer organization includes people who report directly or indirectly up to your manager, but not up to you. If there aren't any groups like this, or they don’t meet the minimum group size, the peer organization includes people who report directly or indirectly up to your skip-level manager but not up to you. If there’s not enough people who meet that definition either, you won't see peer organization insights.

Insights Business Leaders who are viewing insights for the entire company will also not see peer organization insights.
Prior period – The prior period is the period immediately before the most recent period – usually the week before the most recent completed week.
Reporting hierarchy – Your Insights administrator manages the reporting hierarchy. This hierarchy identifies reporting relationships throughout the company: people who are managers, and the people who report to them. The reporting hierarchy might be sourced from Microsoft Entra ID or from a manual upload from your company’s HR information system. Viva Insights uses this information to identify people in your organization, your peer organization, and any organizations that might report up to you.
Your organization – If the insight scope selector says Your organization, this group includes everyone who reports to you directly or indirectly. This group is based on your organization’s reporting hierarchy, your Insights administrator manages. If the insights scope selector says [Your company name], this group includes everyone who has been set up as part of the premium insights group by your Insights administrator.

Metric definitions

The following table lists metrics related to organization insights. You can also access metric definitions while you're using Viva Insights—just select the (i) icon next to the organization insight card or organization insight page title.

Refer to Metric definitions for all Viva Insights metric definitions.

Metric	How it’s calculated
After-hours collaboration hours	After-hours collaboration measures how much time per week a person spends in meetings, emails, Teams chats, and Teams calls outside of their configured working hours.
Uninterrupted focus hours	Uninterrupted focus hours measures blocks of time longer than an hour where the person is not in a meeting or Teams call or sending email or Teams chats.
Daily connected hours	Daily connected hours measures time in 30-minute blocks in a day where the person had any activity where they took a meeting or Teams call or sent an email or Teams chat.
Collaboration hours	Collaboration hours measures the total time per week a person spends in meetings, emails, Teams chats, and Teams calls.
Meeting hours	Meeting hours measures the total time per week a person spends in meetings based on accepted meetings on their Outlook calendar and excluding calendar items that are likely non-meetings, such as appointments.
Join on time rate	Join on time rate measures the percentage of Teams meetings where the person joined early or within five minutes of the meeting’s scheduled start time.
Recurring meeting hours	Recurring meeting hours measures the total time per week a person spends in recurring meetings based on accepted meetings on their Outlook calendar and excluding calendar items that are likely non-meetings, such as appointments.
Large and long meeting hours	Large and long meeting hours measures the total time per week a person spends in meetings that are longer than an hour or have more than 8 attendees.
Multitasking hours	Multitasking hours measures how much time per week a person spends in emails and chats that overlap with their meetings and Teams calls.
Manager 1:1 meeting hours	Manager 1:1 meeting hours measures how much time a person spends in meetings with just themselves and their direct manager. This is calculated based on a weekly average.
Internal network size	Internal network size measures the number of colleagues connected to the person. Connections are based on at least two interactions in the prior four-week period, excluding very large and long interactions.
Manager co-attendance rate	Manager co-attendance rate measures what percentage of meeting hours are attended by both the person and the person’s direct manager.

FAQs

Q1. Can I opt in or opt out of seeing organization insights?

To opt out or back into seeing organizational insights, your Viva Insights administrator needs to enable or disable group manager permissions for you. They can enable these permissions by following the directions in Manager settings.

Q2. How do I get access to organization insights?

Refer to Subscriptions, roles, and access in Organization insights.

Q3. I see my organization insights cards, but the current week values are just “—“. What’s happening?

Viva Insights only reports on activity for employees who are “active” in a week—that is, people who sent at least one message in Outlook or Teams or joined at least one meeting. This method improves accuracy by leaving out people who are away from work for an extended period, like when they're on vacation or taking a leave of absence.

To protect individual privacy, you'll only see organization insights when the number of active group members meets the minimum group size your Insights admin set. Some groups might have a group size close to the minimum. In these cases, if enough people are away from work and the number of active people dips below the minimum, you won't be able to access organization insights for that week. However, you can still refer to trend charts on the Wellbeing, Productivity, and Teamwork tabs. These charts show results for previous weeks when your active group met the minimum privacy threshold.

Q4. How do organization insights handle holiday weeks?

Generally, organization insights show lower activity during weeks with holidays, as the measured results aren't adjusted to make up for the holiday. If an employee takes the entire week off from work during the holiday week, they'll be excluded from the measured result. For employees who don't take the week off, Viva Insights measures the activity that did occur over the course of the week.

As discussed in Q2, you might not see results during holiday weeks if enough of your group takes the week off from work and the active group size falls below the minimum privacy threshold.

Q5. Why don’t I see cards showing peer comparison in my organization insights?

To show you peer organization comparisons, Viva Insights looks for people who don’t report up to you, but do report up to your manager or skip-level manager. Viva Insights also checks the size of the peer organization group against the minimum group size to protect individual privacy. If you aren't seeing a peer comparison in your organization insights, it’s because not enough people meet the definition for a peer organization.

If you're in the Your company view, peer comparison insights won't appear; no one's left in the measured population to compare against.

Q6. There are data points missing from my trendline visuals. Why?

To protect individual privacy when a group average appears in an organizational insight, Viva Insights checks to make sure the group is larger than the minimum group size.

The measured group only counts people who are active in Outlook or Teams during the week, so the group size might be lower some weeks than others. For example, the group size is more likely to decrease during the holidays. That means that you might see a result for a particular group for one week, but not for a different week when the group size has gone below the minimum. As a result, you might sometimes see broken or incomplete trendlines.

Q7. I don’t see all of the teams reporting to me in my organization breakdown visual. Why?

To protect individual privacy when a group average appears in an organizational insight, Viva Insights checks to make sure the number of measured people active in Outlook and Teams is larger than the minimum group size. We won't show any groups smaller than the minimum group size.

The trend graph can show up to 20 groups that report up to you. You'll see organization insights for each group larger than the minimum group size.

Q8. Why doesn’t the trendline chart show the most recent week of data?

Viva Insights aggregates new data every week. Usually, the most recent week of data in a trendline is labeled with the first day of the last complete week. For example, if someone viewed their data on Wednesday, October 5, 2022, they'd see the most recent week of data labeled September 25, 2022. This data represents activity between September 25 and October 1.

If the most recent week of data in the trendline is labeled earlier than the first day of the last complete week, it might be because:

The group size has fallen below the minimum in the most recent week.
If it’s early in the week, processing and aggregation of the new data may have been slightly delayed.

Q9. What happens if I have fewer people reporting to me than I used to?

If you're no longer a people manager and have no one directly or indirectly reporting to you, you won't be able to access organization insights.

To be able to access organization trends, you need to have a certain number of direct and indirect reports in the most recent week of available data. This number needs to be above the minimum that your administrator set.

Here's what this means:

If your total number of direct and indirect reports falls below this set minimum, organization insights won't be available to you. If this number seems like an error, your Insights administrator can validate your group against the organization hierarchy.

Viva Insights bases your eligibility to view organization insights on the total size of your group, not just the number of employees in your group actively using Outlook and Teams. If the number of your direct and indirect reports who actively use Outlook and Teams falls below the minimum in the most recent week, you'll still be able to access organization insights. The insights will just show data for the last period when your active group size was above the minimum. You won’t see insights for the week when the active group size was below the minimum. If the number of your direct and indirect reports who actively use Outlook and Teams falls below the minimum in the most recent week, you'll still be able to access organization insights. You won’t see insights for weeks when the active group size falls below the minimum.

Q10. Can I send feedback about these features?

We would love to hear from you! To send feedback, select the Is this helpful? link at the bottom of any page.

Organization insights in Viva Insights