Flexible working hours

[Jakub]

Currently, working hours can be configured:

• Globally for the organization from VIVA Insight level
• Individually for a user from the Outlook Calendar level

In our customer company, users can work on flexible daily “shifts”, from 7 AM to 3 PM or 9 AM to 7 PM. So, for example, each day a user can decide, whether he needs to work from 7 AM or 9 AM on a daily basis.

The above may cause incorrect patterns in the reports as VIVA Insight allows to set only one set of working hours.

Is it possible to provide a workaround for this issue?

How do other companies where the VIVA Insight was implemented solve the problem with flexible working hours?  

[Jake_Caddes · Accepted solution]

This is an interesting case. The short answer is there isn't a viable workaround for this. Viva Insights initially sources licensed users' outlook settings for their working hours, if those aren't present it falls back on the default working hours the Viva Insights Admin chose for the entire licensed population.

An idea that came to mind is to have licensed users continuously update their Outlook working hours, but that is very manual and is not scalable. 
Another idea is that users can set their working hours from 7am to 7pm in Outlook so that all collaboration between those hours is counted as during work hours but that wouldn't capture the collaboration that is technically after/before work hours on days they work different shift times.

[Pawel_Gorski]

If you don't need exact amount of time, but only some estimate of how many hours a day are active outside of regular 8 hours, you can use the hourly collaboration. Either "manually" using raw outputs of "Hourly collaboration" query, or more automated way using R {wpa} module. I often use the flexibility index qualifying how many hours are "active" during the day. If it's over 9, then we have X after hours. Here's more on the relevant functions: Compute a Flexibility Index based on the Hourly Collaboration Query — flex_index • wpa (microsoft.gi...

Please mind the crucial parameters: active_threshold and return. To have most freedom to play with data I recommend using return = "data".

If you are not familiar with this R module @Jakub , then I must warn you: you won't be the same analyst if you check it out. It's like a candy shop 🙂

[AdrianCruz35]

I have the same topic with a client and one of the solutions it´s to create a message and send it to all employees as a part of the onboarding of the Viva Insights platform, even we help them and create an infographic that share the steps that are needed.

Another suggestion might be that if you know what shift they are using you can add that as an odf column, in that case you can understand them as different groups.