Time investors vs Collaborators Directionality

[Kunaal_Bhagani]

Hi All trying to understand if there is directionality with these two in the person to group and group to group queries. 

e.g. 

If Person A Sends emails to Person B and Person B never responds say the collaboration hours amounts to 1 hour. In the query would this show up as

- Time Investor (Person A) to Collaborator (Person B) Collaboration = 1 

- Time Investor (Person B) to Collaborator (Person A) Collaboration = 0

Similarly if Person A schedules a meeting with Person B say 1 hour and Person B attend the meeting. However Person B has never set up any meetings with Person A. Will this also show up as:

- Time Investor (Person A) to Collaborator (Person B) Collaboration = 1 

- Time Investor (Person B) to Collaborator (Person A) Collaboration = 0

Essentially In the two examples above person B aced as a collaborator but never initiated anything with Person B. so the directionality of hte time investment is always Person a to Person B.

Can someone confirm this. 

@Jake_Caddes 

[Jake_Caddes]

Hi @Kunaal_Bhagani, I have sent your questions to the product team. We will get an answer back to you next week. Thanks for your patience.

[Kunaal_Bhagani]

@Jake_Caddes - Any update from product team?

[Jake_Caddes]

Hi Kunaal, I've been following up with the PM who is in charge of metrics but they have been out of the office. I am looking to find a new PM to answer this. So sorry for the extremely long delay.

[Jessalynn_Uchac · Accepted solution]

Hi Kunaal! The directionality in group queries actually has nothing to do with who initiated collaboration. You can think of time investors as the "subject" of the measure, and the collaborators as the "object" that they are collaborating with. So if A spends an hour sending emails to B, it will show up as one hour of time that A invested in B. If A spends an hour in meetings with B, it will also show up as one hour of time that A invested in B. The special perspective of the group queries is that they view collaboration time as something that can be budgeted between collaborators, so if that same meeting is instead between A, B, and C, then A's time "investment" will be evenly split between B and C. But there's no consideration for who initiated the meeting or email.

I hope that helps to clarify!

@Kunaal_Bhagani 

[Kunaal_Bhagani]

Thanks Jessalynn

Doesn't Time investor i.e. the person initiating imply directionality? i.e. if A set up a meeting with B and C doesn't this imply that A is setting up the interaction with B and C? granted in some cases managers will ask a junior to set up the meeting but fundamentally i thought the initiator of the email, meeting, call (digital exhaust) was the source at least as I think about it for the network query.

So in your example would a group to group query for a 1 on 1 look as follows if the time investor initiated or set up?

- Time Investor (Person A) to Collaborator (Person B) -> Collaboration Hours = 1

For a meeting with multiple recipients (assume 1 hour meeting and A, B, and C are all participants but A set the meeting up):

- Time Investor (Person A) to Collaborator (Person B) -> Collaboration Hours = 0.5

- Time Investor (Person A) to Collaborator (Person C) -> Collaboration Hours = 0.5

What about B and C who are on the same meeting and technically collaborating with each other and A? If directionality isn't a factor would it be 0.33hr for all three participants?

[Jessalynn_Uchac]

Hi Kunaal! The time investor is not the person who initiated the collaboration. Every person in an interaction is a time investor if they are licensed and not otherwise filtered out of the time investor group when you set up the query.

In your first example, A invested 1 hour in B. B also invested 1 hour in A.

In your second example, assuming the three people are in three different groups, then A invested 30 minutes in B and 30 minutes in C. B invested 30 minutes in A and 30 minutes in C. C invested 30 minutes in A and 30 minutes in B. From each person's perspective, there are two other people in the meeting, so they are splitting their time between the two.

If, say, A and B are in the same group, and C is in a different group, the time allocation would change, because we assume groups don't give time to themselves if other groups are present. In that case, A would give one hour to C, B would give one hour to C, and C would give 30 minutes each to A and B (which would appear as one hour given to their shared group).

[Kunaal_Bhagani]

Thank you. Out of curiosity does thsi also apply to person to group query?

Also which i get these queries do not show directionality, doesn't sending an email imply directionality or even initiating a chat with someone? Are there any queries that we can see this directionality? the network queries do not go into detail about collaboration hours etc.

[Jessalynn_Uchac]

The person to group queries (using an hours-based metric) use the same time allocation logic. The only difference is that the assumption I mentioned above that "groups don't give time to themselves if other groups are present" doesn't apply, because the time investor in person to group is a person, not a group. 

Directionality is available in relatively few metrics and reports in Viva Insights because the signal is not a reliable indicator of who is "driving" the conversation (especially for meetings, where the initiator is often just the first person with a few moments to get it scheduled on a calendar). However, there are a series of person query metrics called "generated workload" that do take directionality into account. For each person, they measure how much participant time (or how many instances) are associated with meetings, emails, and chats that they initiated. For example, if I invite three people to a one-hour meeting, I have "generated workload" of three hours. 

Curious to know what specific research questions you are looking to answer using directional metrics, as it might be helpful as we think about future metrics to develop!