Guidelines v. Benchmarks

Worklytics offers high-level guideline ranges to all customers and has a formal benchmarking dataset that is available to participating companies.

Overview of Guideline Ranges

Worklytics establishes guidelines for work activity metrics with the goal of providing organizations with recommended ranges for common values. The guidelines provided are based on industry best practices and the direct experience of the Worklytics team. They are not an industry benchmark.

The Guidelines are intended to reflect an estimate of the ideal range of activity for a typical knowledge worker. These types of employees would be expected to have ample time for deep thinking and focused work, as well as be less likely to experience burnout. Ranges are based on average weekly values per person over a 12 week period.

Here is a sample of guideline ranges for frequently-used metrics:

Metric	Guideline	Context from prior driver analyses
calendar:events:hours:meetings	4.5-8 hours per week	Employees that attend more than 8 hours of meetings tend to report difficulty getting things done
chat:v1:incoming:after-hours	5-15 messages per week	Employees that receive more than 15 after-hours slack messages tend to be at higher risk for stress and burnout, especially if those messages come from a direct manager
worklytics:hours:in:focus:blocks:v3:flow	3.5+ hours per day	People with fewer than 3.5 hours of daily focus time tend to report feeling less productive
worklytics:weekdays:avg:timespan:hours	7.5-9 hours per day	Teams that consistently work long hours are at risk for burnout. Very high values may also be a signal that there is a high prevalence of after-hours work
worklytics:weekends:total:time:worked:hours	0.5-1.5 hours	While some weekend work may be needed at times, consistently working long hours on the weekends was associated with burnout risk
collaborators:count_distinct	60-150 collaborators per week	Employees that interact with very few people tend to report feelings of isolation
collaborators:strong_count_distinct	5-12 collaborators per week	Employees that have to work with more than 12 people each week tend to report perceptions of slower decision making and difficulty getting things done, while those who work with fewer than 5 people closely may have issues gaining visibility for their work
calendar:manager1on1:count	0.5-1.5 manager 1:1s per week	The number of weekly manager 1:1s is one of the biggest predictors of manager satisfaction and employee engagement, and we recommend a 1:1 every 1-2 weeks

Overview of Benchmarks

Benchmarks offer more specific insight into how your company's work patterns compare to those of other companies. Benchmarks are available to participating companies and represent tens-of-millions of records and tens-of-thousands of employees across six different industries.

We chose our analysis approach to offer maximal clarity, while respecting a diverse set of participating firms' privacy, security and data protection expectations. Ultimately, we estimate benchmarks using Monte Carlo simulation and report fifth-quantiles for a subset of metrics at the manager, IC, and all-employee level. Future versions of the benchmarks product will incorporate additional cuts of data, among other improvements.

See the illustrative example below.

Note: If you are interested in exploring benchmarks for your organization and are not already a participating company, please contact [e-mail].

When to use each

We typically use the guidelines to highlight "what good looks like" and how that compares to the reality at a company.

Benchmarks can be more specific and offer a point of comparison between your company and other organizations. However, as we see with focus time (example from our latest Industry Report below), most employees do not get the ideal amount on a regular basis. At a glance, having an org-wide value close to the 50th percentile of our focus time benchmark may seem like a good thing, but it would actually suggest your company needs more focus time if compared to the guideline range. We therefore recommend using the guideline ranges and benchmarks in combination with each other.