Privacy and data access

Important

This article is for the legacy Workplace Analytics app and does not reflect functionality available on the updated Viva Insights platform. Access current documentation for Viva Insights advanced insights here: advanced insights documentation.

Being aware of employees' rights is a key component to ensuring a successful program using Microsoft Viva Insights. It's important to consider ever-changing laws and regulations about employer-employee relationships, privacy, personal data, and company policies, before using the Viva Insights web features.

Viva Insights doesn't encode any specific policy. Instead, it gives control to the administrators to configure the product to be consistent with applicable laws, regulations, and company policies. Your organization chooses what data to use in the app.

Important

Consult with your legal and human resources teams before enabling Microsoft Viva Insights for your organization.

You decide who gets to see what data

Organizations decide who has access to Viva Insights data. Primary users must receive suitable training in privacy, in company’s policies, and other applicable subject areas, before being granted access to the data.

The following levels of permission provide access to the Viva Insights data:

• Analyst (Limited Access) has access to the Organizational insights in Microsoft Teams and Viva Insights with analysis features where the minimum group size is enforced.
• Analyst has full access to all product features except the administrator features.
• Administrator role has access to administrator features only (such as some of the Analyst settings and Data Source in Viva Insights).
• Program manager has access to Viva Insights in Teams and in Viva Insights, where program managers can also explore metrics in cases where the minimum group size is enforced. They also have access to Plans in Viva Insights and its Manage and Track pages, where they can set up plans and track the progress of active or ended plans.
• People managers who meet the minimum team size can get access to Viva Insights in Teams and in Viva Insights through Manager settings. They can also explore metrics about their specific team and access Plans in Viva Insights, where they can set up plans and track plan progress.

You control the data that Viva Insights uses

You have full control over what data is used and how it's used within Viva Insights. Viva Insights uses Microsoft 365 email, calendar metadata, and external data exported from an HR system, to compute how much time groups within your organization spend in meetings, emails, calls, and chats.

Viva Insights processes organizational data from the HR system and collaboration data from Microsoft 365 to provide analysts with a unified pool of data to analyze.

Organizational data

Organizational data is contextual information about your employees (for example: job title, level, location) and can come from human resources, information systems, or other line-of-business data stores. Viva Insights combines Microsoft 365 email, calendar, call, and instant message metadata with the organizational data that you choose to use. With this data, it provides rich and actionable insights into your company’s communication and collaboration trends to help you make more effective business decisions.

The organizational data set is combined with the Microsoft 365 metadata to produce the complete dataset that is analyzed for insights. The data sets are combined using the email addresses of the users, but the email addresses are never shown in Viva Insights through dashboards or query results.

Other information provided in the organizational data set is exposed in Viva Insights and in Viva Insights. Take care to ensure that the data set doesn't include personal data (such as the employee ID). For more information, see Prepare organizational data.

Collaboration data from Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 email, calendar, call, and instant message metadata provide the foundation for all analysis in Viva Insights. So, the first step is to determine which users you want to include. When you choose a user to be included, Viva Insights uses the following information about items in that user's mailbox and calendar:

item	originator	recipient	subject	chronology	status	venue
email	sender	recipients	subject line	sent time
meeting	organizer	invitees	subject line	scheduled time	attendee status	scheduled location
call	organizer	invitees		scheduled time, call joined time, call duration	call/join status
chat	sender of initial IM	recipients		IM sent time

Important

Attachments and text in the body of email and meetings are never used by Viva Insights. Furthermore, rights-managed, confidential, and private email and meetings are excluded altogether.