Network in Viva Insights

Use the Network page in the Viva Insights app in Teams and web to understand who you collaborate with most and when.

Find the Network page from your Teamwork tab:

Under the Build better relationships section, in the Time spent collaborating with others card.
Select View my network.

The Network consists of two sections: Collaborators and Communication habits.

If you hold a meeting or exchange email, chats, or calls with coworkers, Viva Insights considers those coworkers collaborators.

Types of collaborators

Important collaborators – Coworkers you've marked as important in Viva Insights. Marking people as important (or "pinning" them) helps you keep up with their requests in Suggested tasks and find them quickly on your collaboration map. We discuss pinning contacts a little later in this article.

Active collaborators – Coworkers you've collaborated with in the past four weeks.

Collaboration map

The Collaborators section arranges your active collaborators in a three-ring map view—from Most frequent to Least frequent collaboration time. Viva Insights estimates total collaboration time based on the number of hours and minutes you've spent collaborating with a contact, both during and outside of your working hours, over the past four weeks. 

If you want more information about how much time you’re spending with a contact, select their profile image. The tooltip shows you your total collaboration time with that contact, and then breaks down collaboration time by each communication channel—emails, meetings, and chats and calls.

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Edit your important people list

Add

You can add someone to your important people list:

At the top of your Network page, you might notice they're a suggested contact. To add them to your important list, select the Pin button.
If the person you want to pin isn't suggested, use the search bar just above your collaborator map. Type in their name, and then select Pin.

After you mark a contact as important, and if they're also an active collaborator, they'll show up in your map with a star next to their name. If an important contact isn't an active collaborator, you'll still get their tasks prioritized in Suggested tasks. If you search for them in the Collaborators section, they'll show as pinned.

Remove

To remove someone from your important people list, select the Unpin icon, which looks like a star on the collaboration map. To quickly find a contact, use the search bar.

Tips: Here are a couple tips to keep your network up to date:

Keep adding top collaborators to your important people list and remove some if you need to. Make sure your list reflects who you spend time working with.
Make time for networking. Making time to foster relationships and grow your network has proven to contribute to professional advancement.

Communication habits shows how you communicate with people in your network.

Your total communication over the last four weeks is broken out by communication type: emails sent, emails read, and chats and calls.

How Viva Insights calculates your communication habits

For more detailed information, check out this article - Meeting and communications in Viva Insights reference.

Email 

Emails sent and Emails read estimate how much time you've spent sending and reading emails across all devices, like laptops, and mobile phones.

To figure out which emails to include in its Emails read calculations, Viva Insights uses an email's To and Cc lines. If you, or a group you're a member of, are on an email's To or Cc line, Viva Insights uses that email to calculate Emails read. Viva Insights doesn't use emails you delete without opening in its calculations.

Sending and reading time

For each email you send, Viva Insights assigns five minutes of sending time. For each email you open, Viva Insights assigns two and a half minutes of reading time.

However, in the following situations, Viva Insights assigns shorter times: 

You send one email and then open or send another one within five minutes. In this case, Viva Insights assigns the time between the two actions to the first email (that is, the sent email).
You open one email and then open or send another one within two and a half minutes. In this case, Viva Insights also assigns the time between the two actions to the first email (that is, the opened email).

Note: The time you spend sending or reading email outside your Outlook-defined working hours affects some insights you get on the Wellbeing tab. 

Chats and calls 

Your audio calls, video calls, and chats in Teams also count as collaboration activities.

Chats

For each chat you send, Viva Insights assigns 30 seconds of sending time. Viva Insights doesn't assign any time for chats received, because the time you spend sending chats is a good indicator of how much time you spent in a chat conversation.

Viva Insights counts all chats you send within a 15-minute window as one chat.

Note: Viva Insights doesn't use chats from Teams channels in its calculations.

Calls

For each call that isn't scheduled as a meeting on your calendar, Viva Insights uses the actual duration of the call. Viva Insights doesn't assign any time for calls scheduled as meetings in your calendar, because it's already counting those calls as meeting time.

Learn more about how Viva Insights derives meeting insights in Meeting habits.