Identifying noteworthy groups with rank functions

Introduction

This article introduces the rank functions that are included in the wpa R package. These are powerful functions that scan a full person query dataset and automatically identify noteworthy groups, i.e. those exhibiting the highest or lowest values for a metric in the population.

Rank functions can uncover previously unknown patterns and interesting trends, without analysts having to manually slice the data across multiple attributes. You can think of them as a tool for automatic group exploration - an efficient method for identifying the top and bottom group of employees without manually reviewing all the possible organisational divisions.

Additionally, these functions can reveal what combination of attributes best describe a group that shows a specific behaviour (i.e for example, what organisational attributes represent employees suffering from excessive workload, receiving insufficient coaching, etc). As business leaders often want to develop targeted interventions to address specific issues, these functions can be a great way to inform action planning and transformation initiatives.

This article is divided in four sections. After this introduction, section two describes rank functions and show how them can be used with person query outputs. In the following section, we explore their use for profiling - i.e. to identify in which groups a specific behaviour is most common. The fourth and final section includes a list of additional use cases that can benefit from this method.

Rank Functions

Baseline analysis

To get started, let’s open a new session in R and load the wpa R package. We will also use dplyr to facilitate data manipulation:

library(wpa)
library(dplyr)

We will use the sq_data demo dataset, which contains a weekly person query output, and apply the collaboration_rank() function:

sq_data %>% 
    collaboration_rank(return = "table")
#> # A tibble: 30 × 4
#>    hrvar            group                Collaboration_hours     n
#>    <chr>            <chr>                              <dbl> <int>
#>  1 FunctionType     Sales                               31.0    82
#>  2 Organization     Inventory Management                26.2    60
#>  3 FunctionType     Marketing                           25.8   207
#>  4 Organization     Human Resources                     24.4    71
#>  5 Organization     IT-Corporate                        23.7    68
#>  6 Organization     G&A South                           23.1    76
#>  7 Organization     Finance-East                        22.2    70
#>  8 LevelDesignation Manager                             21.5   333
#>  9 Organization     Finance-West                        20.6    73
#> 10 Organization     IT-East                             20.6    62
#> # … with 20 more rows

The output table contains the results from the automatic group exploration. The rank function has taken all available organisational attributes in this dataset (FunctionType, Organization, LevelDesignation, and IsActive) and calculated the average collaboration hours for each group within each organisational attribute. The table shows the analysed results for all groups, ranked from highest to lowest.

To view the entire table, we can add the function print to the command above.

sq_data %>% 
    collaboration_rank(return = "table") %>%  
    print(n = 30)
#> # A tibble: 30 × 4
#>    hrvar            group                Collaboration_hours     n
#>    <chr>            <chr>                              <dbl> <int>
#>  1 FunctionType     Sales                               31.0    82
#>  2 Organization     Inventory Management                26.2    60
#>  3 FunctionType     Marketing                           25.8   207
#>  4 Organization     Human Resources                     24.4    71
#>  5 Organization     IT-Corporate                        23.7    68
#>  6 Organization     G&A South                           23.1    76
#>  7 Organization     Finance-East                        22.2    70
#>  8 LevelDesignation Manager                             21.5   333
#>  9 Organization     Finance-West                        20.6    73
#> 10 Organization     IT-East                             20.6    62
#> 11 LevelDesignation Senior IC                           20.1   103
#> 12 IsActive         TRUE                                19.9  1034
#> 13 LevelDesignation Junior IC                           19.6   105
#> 14 FunctionType     Engineering                         19.6    93
#> 15 FunctionType     Operations                          19.1   176
#> 16 LevelDesignation Executive                           19.0     6
#> 17 Organization     G&A Central                         18.9    57
#> 18 LevelDesignation Director                            18.9    68
#> 19 LevelDesignation Support                             18.8   419
#> 20 Organization     Finance-South                       18.6    81
#> 21 Organization     Facilities                          18.6    72
#> 22 Organization     Customer Service                    18.3    61
#> 23 Organization     Financial Planning                  17.1    75
#> 24 FunctionType     Finance                             16.5   146
#> 25 Organization     Finance-Corporate                   16.3    68
#> 26 Organization     G&A East                            16.2    65
#> 27 FunctionType     G_and_A                             16.0   128
#> 28 FunctionType     R_and_D                             15.2   151
#> 29 FunctionType     IT                                  15.0    51
#> 30 Organization     Biz Dev                             14.7    75

This analysis shows us that the 82 employees labelled as "FunctionType = "Sales" have the highest collaboration hours, with a weekly average of 31 hours. In second place, there are 60 individuals in Organization = "Inventory Management" with 26.2 hours. On the lower end, the 75 employees labelled as Organization = "Biz Dev" appear to have the lowest collaboration time.

This output is useful to identify groups that are worth investigating (e.g. employees labelled as "FunctionType = Sales"). It also reveals that splits by FunctionType and Organization are more interesting than those by LevelDesignation, as they have more variation; all groups in LevelDesignation have similar levels of collaboration, between 18 and 22 hours a week. Rank functions can also display this information in visual form. We can get that by changing the return argument from "table" to "plot":

sq_data %>% 
    collaboration_rank(return = "plot")

This plot contains the same information as the table above. Each row corresponds to a different organisational attribute and the bubbles show how the population is split across different subgroups, where bubble size is proportional to the number of individuals. The five groups in orange are clearly the ones spending most time in collaboration, with Sales being far ahead of the other groups. Keep in mind that each row of bubbles represents a different way to slice the same population, so groups across rows are not mutually exclusive.

Combining two HR variables

In our baseline analysis, we uncovered that the 82 employees labelled as FunctionType = "Sales" have the highest average collaboration hours. However, it is likely that some employees in this group are more affected than others. Furthermore, there may be pockets in other parts of this company that may be experiencing similar levels of collaboration overload, but that are hidden given the structure of the organisational data (for example, the managers within a particular business unit).

The rank function includes an additional mode called “combine” that allows us to take our analysis one step further by performing on two HR variables the same analysis in a combinatorial manner:

sq_data %>% 
    collaboration_rank(return = "table", mode = "combine")
#> # A tibble: 382 × 4
#>    hrvar    group                                                 Collab…¹     n
#>    <chr>    <chr>                                                    <dbl> <int>
#>  1 Combined [FunctionType] Sales [LevelDesignation] Manager           33.7    28
#>  2 Combined [FunctionType] Sales [LevelDesignation] Junior IC         31.0    13
#>  3 Combined [FunctionType] Sales [LevelDesignation] Support           29.5    24
#>  4 Combined [FunctionType] Sales [LevelDesignation] Director          29.2     6
#>  5 Combined [FunctionType] Sales [LevelDesignation] Senior IC         28.2    11
#>  6 Combined [FunctionType] Marketing [LevelDesignation] Manager       27.4    72
#>  7 Combined [FunctionType] Marketing [LevelDesignation] Junior IC     25.9    17
#>  8 Combined [FunctionType] Marketing [LevelDesignation] Director      25.1    14
#>  9 Combined [FunctionType] Marketing [LevelDesignation] Support       25.1    81
#> 10 Combined [FunctionType] Marketing [LevelDesignation] Senior IC     24.3    22
#> # … with 372 more rows, and abbreviated variable name ¹Collaboration_hours

The output table contains similar results from the group exploration above, but with more granularity. The function has automatically created smaller groups by combining two distinct groups from the organisational attributes in scope. In this case, it seems that the 28 managers in Sales are the worst affected group, with a weekly average of 33.7 hours in collaboration per week - that sounds like a lot of meetings!

Additional functions

So far, we have limited our analysis to collaboration_rank(), which only performs the analysis on the metric Collaboration_hours. However, the wpa R package includes many other rank functions for key Workplace Analytics metrics:

afterhours_rank() - for After_hours_collaboration_hours
email_rank() - for Email_hours
meeting_rank() - for Meeting_hours
one2one_rank() - for Meeting_hours_with_manager_1_on_1
workloads_rank() - for Workweek_span

Additionally, if you want to apply this to any other numeric variable of your choice, you can use the more general version below by specifying the metric as a string with the argument metric:

create_rank()

Using rank functions for profiling

In the previous section, we explored how rank functions can help analysts uncover interesting insights, without the need of manually slicing the data across multiple attributes.

Rank functions have an additional use: they can help us identify what combination of attributes best describe a group that shows a given behaviour. For example, we may be concerned about individuals that are experiencing both a heavy collaboration load (more than 20 hours a week on average) and long workweeks (workweek span of over 60 hours), and would like to know where in the organisations these individuals sit.

To answer that question, let’s create a new numeric custom metric (i.e. a binary flag that is only either 1 or 0) and then apply the create_rank() function:

sq_data %>%
    mutate(At_risk = ifelse(Collaboration_hours > 20 &  Workweek_span > 60 , 1, 0)) %>%
    create_rank(metric = "At_risk", mode = "combine")
#> # A tibble: 382 × 4
#>    hrvar    group                                                 At_risk     n
#>    <chr>    <chr>                                                   <dbl> <int>
#>  1 Combined [FunctionType] Sales [LevelDesignation] Junior IC       0.314    13
#>  2 Combined [FunctionType] Sales [LevelDesignation] Manager         0.286    28
#>  3 Combined [FunctionType] Marketing [LevelDesignation] Director    0.280    14
#>  4 Combined [FunctionType] Sales [LevelDesignation] Support         0.272    24
#>  5 Combined [FunctionType] Sales [LevelDesignation] Director        0.269     6
#>  6 Combined [FunctionType] Sales [LevelDesignation] Senior IC       0.266    11
#>  7 Combined [FunctionType] Marketing [LevelDesignation] Manager     0.254    72
#>  8 Combined [FunctionType] Marketing [LevelDesignation] Senior IC   0.252    22
#>  9 Combined [FunctionType] Marketing [LevelDesignation] Support     0.232    81
#> 10 Combined [FunctionType] Marketing [LevelDesignation] Junior IC   0.190    17
#> # … with 372 more rows

The custom At_risk variable identifies whether any particular person-week exhibits high collaboration hours and long workweeks. By combining this with create_rank(), the analysis reveals that the combination of heavy collaboration load plus long workweeks is most prevalent among the 13 employees in FunctionType = "Sales" and LevelDesignation = "Junior IC". In other words, the average employee of these groups experience high collaboration load and long workweeks 31% of the time.

Conclusion, use cases and other applications

In this article, we have shown how rank functions can be a powerful tool to both uncover previously unknown patterns and to profile the groups that are experiencing a certain behaviour. In the context of Workplace Analytics, we see a wide range of applications in the areas of wellbeing, ways of working, and sales excellence. Examples include:

Workload: Identifying groups with excessive collaboration and long workdays
Freedom to disconnect: Identifying groups with always-on behaviours
Coaching: Identifying groups with insufficient coaching and manager time
Exposure: Identifying groups with insufficient skip-level exposure
Isolation: Identifying groups with insufficient cross-team collaboration
Sales performance: Identifying groups with insufficient external collaboration

Feedback

We hope you found this article useful!

If you have any suggestions or feedback, please submit an issue at https://github.com/microsoft/wpa/issues.

Carlos Morales-Torrado

2021-06-30