Frequently Asked Questions

Below, you will find answers to our most frequently asked questions related to the dataset.

Dataset Format

Q: What do the dates mean?

A: Worklytics data is grouped by week. We consider weeks in ISO format, so weeks start on Monday and comprise Monday to the following Sunday (inclusive).

Q: What is a GROUP_TYPE in the context of this document?

GROUP_TYPE is any of: cost center, business segment, business unit, cost center, department, level, other affiliations, region, territory, role or the special maingroup, which is equivalent to the primary group type chosen by the customer.

Q: What does CUSTOM_GROUP_X mean in the context of this document?

Custom groups represent any additional HR data fields provided by your company outside of the standard fields (e.g., department, level, role, etc.). These will vary by organization.

Q: What does cv12wk mean in the context of this document?

Values with the suffix "cv12wk" are the "coefficient of variation" for the underlying variable over the trailing 12 weeks. Coefficient of variation is the standard deviation of the variable divided by its mean. We use the coefficient of variation because, unlike standard deviation, it does not depend on the unit of the variable. Eg, you can sensibly compare cv12wk for a variable measured in minutes with one measured in hours. We colloquially describe this as "volatility" because the greater the typical change in the underlying variable from week-to-week, the higher this number will be. So if one variable has cv12wk of 1, and the other has cv12wk of 2, the other can be thought of as "twice as volatile".

Q: How are meeting time values expressed?

A: Meeting time is expressed as hours in decimal format (e.g. a value of 1.25 equates to 1 h 15 min). You can multiply by 60 to get the amount of time in minutes.

Q: How does metric versioning work?

A: In certain cases, you may see metrics that appear similar but are differentiated by a v1, v2, or v3. In this case, the highest number represents the most up-to-date metric, though there are edge cases where you may want to use an earlier version. If no version can be found in the metric name, this is considered a v0 metric (earliest version).

Metric Definitions

Q: How do the versions of focus time differ? Which one should I use?

A: In most cases, v3:flow, as this takes interruptions from meetings, email, and chat into account and reflects our most up-to-date methodologies (v3:flow is based on a 2-hour block). However, certain roles may be better suited to the v3:prep or v3:focus versions of the metric.

To allow for further understanding of focus time and the related areas of opportunity, we also define and measure fragmented and interrupted time.

Essentially, fragments are blocks of time too short to be considered focus time but otherwise uninterrupted. And interrupted time adds up all the fragments and time spent on activities considered to be interruptions in order to calculate how much of the day is interrupted.

Q: What is a collaborator? A strong collaborator?

A: A collaborator is anyone you’ve interacted with through email, slack, meetings, or other collaboration tools in a given week. This is an estimate of your weekly work network.

A strong collaborator is the subset of these people with whom you’ve spent 2+ hours that week. This is an estimate of your day-to-day working group.

Q: What is the difference between inter- and intra-department collaboration?

A: Inter-department collaboration include at least one person from another team. Intra-department collaboration are single-team. These metrics can be calculated at the team, department, or other level.

Q: Are there thresholds in place for what is considered "collaboration"? Are meetings above the threshold completely removed from the dataset?

A: Unless your company has set a different threshold, events larger than 75 are excluded from collaboration-related calculations (e.g., we don't consider someone to have 10,000 collaborators because they attended an all-hands meeting). However, that very large meeting would still appear as a meeting in the dataset, given that it is an event that took up employee time.

Q: When might collaboration totals between a pair differ?

Meetings are a bidirectional form of collaboration, though slack and email (for example) occur in a single direction. The example below illustrates a case where collaboration is asymmetric between two parties over the course of a month.

Q: Why are collaboration time aggregate values greater than the total time in a given week in some cases?

A: For collaboration time aggregates (E.g., GROUP_TYPE_individual_collaboration_interteam_hours), this can happen because these metrics are a sum of the total time spent collaborating with each individual associated with a particular work item. For instance, spending 1 hour in a meeting with 4 team members will be counted as 4 hours collaborating with your team.

Working with the Data

Q: Which aggregates are used most frequently by customers?

A: Our Top 10 most popular aggregates are:

Metric	Definition
worklytics:active:employees	Boolean. 1 means that person is considered active that week based on their use of collaboration tools.
collaborators:count_distinct	Total number of collaborators this week. This value may be large, as it could include anyone attending the same large meeting or on the same large email thread.
collaborators:strong_count_distinct	Total number of collaborators considered strong this week (requires 2+ hours of collaboration across email, meetings, and messaging). This metric can be useful in determining working groups.
email:outgoing:internal	Count of emails sent to other employees.
chat:v1:outgoing:after-hours	Number of slack, gchat, etc. messages sent outside of one's work hours. Work hours is configurable at an org level; default is 9:00-17:00.
worklytics:hours:in:focus:blocks:v3:flow	Average hours of at least 2h work blocks uninterrupted by mail, chat or video-conferencing on workdays (Mon-Fri).
calendar:manager1on1:count	Number of meetings with manager in week.
calendar:events:attended	Number of meetings attended. By default, a person is considered to have attended as long as they did not decline the invite.
calendar:events:hours:meetings	Total hours spent in meetings. Multiply by 60 to get minutes.
worklytics:weekdays:avg:timespan:hours	Average weekly time span for a person, 0-24 range. E.g., 12.50 means 12:30 hours. Time span is the time between the first and last action of the day & is an estimate of workday length.

See List of Aggregates in the Data Export documentation for the full list of aggregates.