Aggregates Methodology

Notes on general methodology applied to generate aggregate metrics.

Metric Availability

Note that not all metrics in Data Dictionary will necessarily appear in your company’s export, as some require specific data connectors (e.g., if your company has not connected GitHub, you will not see any of the github: metrics). The list of metrics may change as aggregates are added over time.

Active Employees

Worklytics uses the flag worklytics:active:employees, which has a value of 1 for weeks when a given employee is active and a value of 0 for when said employee is inactive. We define active based on whether the employee has taken any action across digital tools that is not a calendar attendance or an email auto-response (which are both considered passive actions).

Default Values & After-Hours Metrics

The default work week is Monday to Friday, and the default work day is 9:00 to 17:00. Unless you have made changes to the defaults for your company or provided work hours via an HRIS file, after-hours metrics are calculated based on these values, combined with employee calendar data to take time zone into account (e.g., an email received at 19:00 local time is considered to be after-hours; a meeting on Saturday is considered weekend work). If employees have set their calendar hours to something other than the default values, we use what the employee has set to calculate after-hours.

Exclusive Time

Worklytics algorithmically estimates the time spent on each work activity to make apples-to-apples comparisons possible across tools, a process which can be relevant for measurement of tools like Slack and email that don't automatically have an associated hourly cost like meetings do. For example, an instance of someone sending 10 rapid-fire Slack messages might be estimated to take 2 minutes of time based on default values used for Slack bounded by any activities that are happening before and after each message is sent.

Exclusive time calculations underlie metrics like focus time (used broadly) and can be seen directly in metrics following the TOOL:minutes:week format (typically used only for a few specific modeling use cases).

Meetings

Meeting Definitions

To be considered a meeting, a calendar event must meet the following criteria:

• At least 2+ human attendees (e.g., adding a meeting room to a calendar invite would not count as another attendee) that have not declined the event

• Less than 7 hours in length

We include "maybe" RSVPs as meeting attendees, because in practice, we see that employees at many companies often attend meetings they have neither declined nor accepted. In cases where meetings overlap and the RSVP is different, the higher RSVP takes precedence in the following order:

1. ACCEPTED

2. TENTATIVE

3. NEEDS ACTION

4. DECLINED

Meeting Time

For meetings specifically, Worklytics provides several layers of insight:

• Meeting count: reports on the total number of meetings

• Direct time: sum of all meeting hours, regardless of when they occur

• Exclusive meeting time: de-dupes overlapping meetings from direct time

• Exclusive time: subtracts time spent on other events that happen during meetings from meeting time

For example, consider a person who accepts the calendar invite for a team all-hands (10 people) from 10-11am on Tuesday and a 1:1 (2 people) at the same time and then sends Slack messages for 5 total minutes of time during the 10-11am hour.

• Meeting count: this person attended 2 meetings

• Direct time: this person attended 2 hours of meetings

• Exclusive meeting time: this person was in meetings for a total of 1 hour (30 minutes in each because both meetings had the same RSVP and overlap fully)

• Exclusive time: this person spent 55 minutes of time exclusively on meetings (27.5 minutes on each because 5 mins of meeting time was actually spent on Slack)

In most cases, we recommend measuring "Meeting count" or "Exclusive meeting time," though there are instances where "Exclusive time" makes more sense.

Focus Time

Worklytics has created a set of metrics intended to measure the amount of time in the day available for deep, focused work. In theory, the whole span of one’s workday could be used for this purpose, but in reality, this rarely is the case. Meetings, Slack, and email can each break up blocks that could have been used for deep work — and this distraction is measurable.

This metric has several variations:

• worklytics:hours:in:focus:blocks – daily time in blocks of 2+ hours free from meetings. Useful in determining whether meetings are disrupting deep work.

• worklytics:hours:in:focus:blocks:v2 – daily time in blocks of 2+ hours free from meetings, Slack, and email. Useful in investigating a wider set of possible disruptions to deep work.

• worklytics:hours:in:focus:blocks:v3:prep – daily time in blocks of 30+ minutes free from meetings, Slack, and email. Useful as an analysis refinement for groups like sales and customer success that consider meetings a core work activity but still likely need some time to prepare for calls during the day.

• worklytics:hours:in:focus:blocks:v3:focus – daily time in blocks of 1+ hour free from meetings, Slack, and email. Useful as an analysis refinement for groups like people managers and senior leaders that need to push forward larger projects despite a typically heavy meeting load.

• worklytics:hours:in:focus:blocks:v3:flow – daily time in blocks of 2+ hours free from meetings, Slack, and email. Our current best metric for use in investigating a wider set of possible disruptions to deep work. This version is similar to v2, except with several algorithm refinements.

Zoom Attendance

Note that Worklytics only considers call attendance for users who are logged in to Zoom. If individuals are not required to be logged in to join internal Zoom calls (by organizational policy), and they join any calls without logging in to Zoom, their attendance in these calls will not be attributed to them in Worklytics' data. Check with your organization's Zoom administrator to ensure that all users are required to log in to Zoom for internal calls.

In order to prevent outliers from skewing the data, Zoom calls longer than 7h are capped at 7h. Typically, these are the result of rare cases where calls are left open for an extended period of time.