Understanding manager facetime

We recently published a blog about the concept of manager facetime, which we believe is important regardless of whether you work at a remote, hybrid, or fully in-person org. Specifically, employees in our analysis that saw their manager in-person more recently reported higher levels of satisfaction with the amount of coaching and support that their manager provides.

If you're interested in seeing what this looks like for your organization, here's how:

Requirements

• You'll need access to event-level data ({Employee_Events})

• An active badge data connector

• Accurate manager-to-direct report mappings

Methodology

The overall concept starts by determining the dates on which both members of a manager-direct report pair badge into the same office on the same day.

Tactically speaking, your query to identify all instances of badges into a building will look something like this:

SELECT week,
       person_id,
       time_first_visit,
       building_id
FROM (
       SELECT week,
              ARRAY(SELECT props FROM UNNEST(eventProperties) AS props WHERE props.name='buildingId')[OFFSET(0)].value AS building_id,
              employeeId AS person_id,
              MIN(eventTime) AS time_first_visit
       FROM {employee_events}
       WHERE 1=1
       AND week >= '2024-01-01' AND week < '2024-03-31'
       AND sourceKindId ='badge'
       AND employeeId IS NOT NULL
       GROUP BY 1,2,3)
;

From there, you can identify the instances where badges in by the employee and manager happened in the same building on the same day (see query 4.1 here for a similar, tactical example).

Next, to determine how long it's been since facetime has been possible, we calculate the difference in weeks between the current date and the date when we last saw an instance of facetime.

Finally, we aggregate this metric as described here to generate the final visualization.

Notes & Caveats

Is it possible to badge into the same office as your manager and still not see them? Of course. For that reason, we recommend thinking about this metric as an upper bound on how recently facetime could have occurred. In reality, it may be less frequent than badge-ins suggest.

It’s also possible to mitigate false positives by adding an analysis step to ensure a meeting between the manager and the individual contributor happened on the day in question. And team-wide offsites or known company gatherings can be incorporated on an ad hoc basis into this calculation.