Department analytics

Department Overview answers how differently departments use the office. It is the dashboard to open when an attendance policy is in place and the question is whether it is landing evenly, because a company average of two days a week can hide one department at four days and another at almost none.

Select FlowAnalytics in the left menu, then Department. The page has a single dashboard.

Filters, targets, exports and the chart controls work as described in Filters, targets and exports, and what each figure measures is defined in Metrics reference.

What this dashboard needs

Two things have to be in place before this dashboard reports anything:

• Departments on the users. Departments come from the user records under Users, usually populated from the directory or HR system the users are synchronized from.
• An identification level of at least department. The level set for the system decides whether department information is stored with the data at all. Where it is set to store neither user nor department, this dashboard has nothing to work with. See About FlowAnalytics.

Access is separate from the rest of FlowAnalytics as well. The Department page opens for the FlowAnalytics Department Utilization role and for Global Admin, so an administrator with only FlowAnalytics Asset Utilization will not see it in the menu.

Set what the dashboard covers

The filter bar offers Office, floor, zone, Time period, Days, Department and Advanced.

Like Attendance, this dashboard counts people by the day rather than assets by the hour, so it has neither an asset type filter nor a time-of-day filter. Use the Department filter to narrow to the departments you are actually reviewing; the default covers all of them.

The comparison on the cards here reads against the previous period rather than a fixed window, so a 90-day selection is compared with the 90 days before it.

This dashboard has no AI insights panel, so the cards are the first thing on the page.

The key figures

• Average days in office. How many days per week people come in on average, with the target range underneath. This is the figure to hold against a policy, because a policy is written in days per week.
• Average people per department. The average number of employees per department in the selection.
• Number of employees. How many employees the selection covers.
• Employees outside the in-office target. The share of employees whose average days in office falls outside the target range.

Read the first and the last together. An average of 0.8 days against a target of 2 to 3 days already tells you the policy is not being met, but the 91% outside target tells you it is not a few stragglers pulling the average down. It is almost everybody.

The reverse pattern is worth knowing too. An average inside the target with a high share outside it means the population is split, with one group well above the target and another well below, and the average is describing nobody.

Check average people per department first

This card looks like background information and is in fact the thing that decides whether the rest of the page means anything.

Departments usually arrive from a directory or HR system, and in a large organization they are often far more granular than the teams people actually work in: cost centers, legal entities and country-specific units, each with a handful of employees. Where Average people per department is 1 or 2, the department ranking is effectively a per-person ranking with department names attached, and it should not be read as a comparison of teams.

Where that is the case, the useful figures on the page are the office-wide ones, and the department chart is best used to find the extremes rather than to rank the middle.

Days in office by department

Average days in office per week for each department, with a sort control to order the departments and a download icon for the underlying values.

The chart is the argument for or against a policy change, so read it with two things in mind. Departments with very few employees swing between periods on one person’s behavior, and departments whose work is genuinely off site will sit at the bottom for reasons no policy will change. Neither is a finding.

What is a finding is a large department well below the target while comparable departments sit above it, or a whole office where every department is below. The first is a local conversation; the second is a policy or a workplace problem rather than a departmental one.

Employees with no department recorded are grouped under N/A, which appears alongside the real departments. A large N/A bar is a user data problem rather than a finding, and it is worth clearing before the chart is shown to anyone.

People in office by weekday

The number of people in the office per weekday, grouped by department, for the largest departments in the selection. Smaller departments are collected into an Others entry.

This is the chart that finds a capacity problem the weekly averages hide. Departments each averaging two days a week is comfortable if they spread across the week and a queue for desks if they all choose Tuesday. Select an item in the legend to isolate a department and see which days it favors.

People in office over time

A daily trend line per department across the selected period, again for the largest departments with the rest in Others. Hovering a date lists the departments and their figures for that day.

Use it to place a change in time. A department that dropped after a specific week usually has a reason behind it, such as a project ending, a team moving floor or a local holiday, and knowing the date is what turns the drop into an explanation.

Days in office over time

The portfolio average days per week across the period, shown as weekly bars with a dashed trend line. The aggregation is weekly rather than daily, since days per week is only meaningful over a full week.

This is the figure to watch after a policy change, and the trend line is what to read rather than the individual bars. A single week below the target means little; a trend sloping away from it over five or six weeks means the policy is not holding.

Note that the last bar is often a partial week and will sit low for that reason alone. Check the period covered before treating the final bar as a decline.

A note on the top-department charts

Two of the charts on this page cover only the largest departments and group the remainder into Others. That keeps them readable, but it means a small department cannot be found there even when it is the one you are looking for. Use the Department filter to bring a specific department into view instead of hunting for it in the legend.

Reading it alongside the other dashboards

Department Overview says who comes in. It does not say whether there was space for them, so it is usually read next to the Office page:

1. On Department Overview, find the departments furthest from the target.
2. On the Attendance tab of the Office page, check the weekday pattern. Departments concentrating on the same two days is a capacity problem even when the weekly average looks reasonable.
3. On Office Utilization, check whether the office can absorb the attendance the policy is asking for. Raising a target that the desks cannot support will simply move the complaint.

One caution about how this dashboard is used. It names departments and can be read as a compliance report, which is a different thing from a workplace measurement. Where the data is going into a management conversation, the honest reading needs the caveats above: the size of each department, whether its work is site-based at all, and whether the office had room for the days being asked of it.