Group-to-group queries
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.
Group-to-group queries in Microsoft Viva Insights give results that help you understand how a team invested their time across the rest of the organization and beyond. The query results list pairs of groups, as defined by the organizational attributes, along with how much time people in the first group (known as time investors) allocated to other groups (known as collaborators).
Overview of time allocation
An understanding of time allocation helps you create better group queries. The details of time allocation can be complicated. Here is a summary of the basic concepts:
- Time allocation measures how groups spent their time. An interaction is a meeting that was attended or an email that was sent or received. For each interaction, the total time that one group spent on the interaction is divided among the other groups that participated.
- A time investor allocates their time among the other participants in the interaction (the collaborators) in proportion to how many people are in the collaborator group for that interaction.
- A group query can analyze time allocation only for employees in the population of measured employees, namely those who are licensed for Viva Insights. People who do not have a license for Viva Insights can appear as collaborators, but never as time investors.
- The time-allocation approach assumes that a time-investor group allocates time only to themselves if no other groups are participating in the meeting or email.
The following graphic depicts these concepts.
Create a group-to-group query
While setting up a group query differs markedly from setting up meeting or person queries, some of the options you set, such as for time-period aggregation, time range, and meeting-exclusion rules, are the same as for meeting and person queries.
To create a group-to-group query
In Analyze > Query designer, select Get started under Query, and then select Group-to-group.
Name the query and then enter a description for it.
For Group by, select a time-grouping option of day, week, or month.
Select a date range. The query will analyze only those group-to-group interactions that took place during this date range.
Select a meeting exclusions rule. The query will ignore meetings that are filtered out by this rule.
In the Select metrics section, select one or more metrics that measure interactions between the time investors and collaborators, such as Collaboration hours, Email hours, or Meeting hours.
To learn more about metrics for group-to-group queries, see Group-to-group metrics.
The following sections enable you to define how to group the time-investors and the collaborators. For example, to analyze how senior leaders allocated time across different organizations, you'd set the time investors' group to "level" and the collaborators' group to "organization."
In the Time investors section, answer the next question, How do you want to group the time investors? by specifying an attribute for this group, for example, FunctionType, IsInternal, or TenureMonths.
Optionally, you can remove some of the time investors from this analysis by applying one or more filters under the question, Do you want to limit the analysis to only certain time investors?
In the Their collaborators section, you can add filters to exclude collaborators, such as Domain, FunctionType, or Organization, which are the same as for the time investors section.
At this point, the collaborators are ungrouped, which means the query results will not show you which collaborators interacted with the time investors.
Answer the question How do you want to group the people who collaborated with the time investors? to group the collaborators. This answer helps to show you which groups interacted with the time investors. You can also combine groups of collaborators to isolate other specific groups who interacted with the time investors.
Select Run at the top right to run the query.
In Query designer > Results, the query status shows as Submitted. After the query status changes to Succeeded, you can view it, share it, download it (in .csv file format), delete it, or Copy an OData link to use in a visualization tool, such as Power BI or Excel.