VoloMetrix Files Patent for Ground-Breaking Predictive People Analytics Software

SEATTLE, WA--(Marketwired - Aug 27, 2014) - VoloMetrix, a leading people analytics software company that provides actionable insights to improve organizational productivity, today announced it has filed a patent for its groundbreaking technology that promotes organizational growth and efficiency by increasing visibility to employees' time use and relationships inside and outside the company. VoloMetrix's innovative technology enables unprecedented understanding of the daily activities of an organization to diagnose inefficiencies and align teams around top business priorities, resulting in organizational productivity improvements of 10 to 20 percent and reducing operating costs by millions of dollars.

In response to the pending patent, CEO Ryan Fuller said, "Prior to this technology, managers could quantify results but not the actions that drove those results. VoloMetrix's technology gives companies access to the most powerful data they own -- their time -- to objectively evaluate the connection between employee activities and performance. This is poised to revolutionize how we structure organizations, improve coordination, and promote employee engagement."

VoloMetrix's technology, developed by leading data scientists and experienced leaders in business strategy, gathers metadata from anonymous email, calendar, social platforms, and client-specified datasets in real-time to paint a nuanced picture of organizational behavior and communication trends. VoloMetrix's algorithms use these data inputs to identify the optimal employee and team alignments for organizational health. These insights are delivered via easy-to-use interactive dashboards, which enable executives, managers and individuals to clearly diagnose and resolve company-wide issues, specific team challenges, and even individual behaviors.

Key organizational metrics calculated through VoloMetrix's technology include:

• Organizational Load Index (OLI): OLI is calculated as the total amount of time any given employee consumes from the rest of the organization based on meetings they schedule and emails they send out. For example, if Ed schedules a 1 hour meeting with 4 people, he has consumed 4 hours of time from the organization. For both meetings and email, the time imposed on others to read each email sent is calculated using VoloMetrix Time Allocation methods. Using OLI, a 60,000-person manufacturing company discovered that junior managers spent over 30 hours per week "managing up." They set load reduction targets of 30%, aimed at freeing up thousands of FTE equivalent hours.
• Utilization: Utilization is calculated by looking at the spread of hours between a person's FIRST sent email or meeting attended in a day and that person's LAST sent email or meeting attended that day. For instance, if you sent your first email at 7am, your first meeting started at 9am, your last meeting ended at 4:30pm, and you sent your last email at 6pm, your utilization for that day would be 11 hours. Utilization helps employers determine how many hours employees are working, how their work-life balance is, and which activities account for the most hours across an organization.
• Network Efficiency Index: The Network Efficiency Index (NEI) measures how efficiently a given company's employees build and maintain internal networks. It is calculated by the total # of hours spent emailing and meeting with other employees divided by the number of network connections, where "network connection" is calculated based on a pair of employees meeting both a frequency of interaction threshold and an intimacy of interaction threshold (E.g., 2 or more interactions per month which include 5 or fewer people total). NEI provides executives with insights about how well their companies foster internal networking, information sharing, learning and innovation.
• Number of people in cross-collaboration: This metric can be dynamically calculated for any set of two groups within the company. It is based on the number of unique individuals who participated in email communication or attended a meeting involving anyone from the two groups in question. This metric provides unprecedented insight into which teams are collaborating and the frequency and duration of the collaboration. Ineffective collaboration among company teams stifles innovation and growth.
• Time Fragmentation: Time Fragmentation measures the extent to which meetings fragment the working time of employees. It is calculated as the number of 2 hour blocks with no calendared meetings available during normal employee working hours (e.g., if your standard working hours are 8am-5pm and you have a one hour meeting at 10am and a two hour meeting at 2pm, then you would have 2 2-hour blocks of time available.) Research suggests that it takes people at least 15 minutes to regain focus after an interruption, and employees find it difficult to refocus when there is less than an hour until their next meeting. By understanding time fragmentation data, managers can aim to schedule meetings strategically so employees have significant blocks of uninterrupted time each day to focus on their work.

Improving Employee Performance

This solution can also be delivered to the individual level, allowing employees visibility into their own activities relative to peers, providing feedback loops to enable behavioral change, and promoting productivity through performance dashboards and incentive programs. For example, the dashboard may indicate to an employee, "The highest performers at your level spend 20% less time than you do in very large meetings. You have steadily improved in this area and are 4 hours per week away from reaching your goal." These actionable insights empower individual employees to make strategic decisions with their time to optimize performance. They also help leaders anonymously recognize and reward strong behaviors in an organization.

Previously, attempts to understand workplace productivity were limited to the survey/ interview approach of manually gathering data, which is labor intensive and reliant on low-quality self-reported data that represents a snapshot in time. VoloMetrix's technology is cost-effective and provides a continuous stream of high quality objective data that provide actionable insights. These insights will be particularly useful to managers and executives in medium to large organizations who need increased visibility into the everyday productivity of teams to manage effectively.

VoloMetrix's technology revolutionizes management by quantifying inefficient allocation of resources, ineffective collaboration, and top performers. VoloMetrix has already been deployed at several Global 1000 companies, helping them diagnose inefficiencies and align their most valuable assets -- their people -- with the most important business priorities.

About VoloMetrix:
VoloMetrix is a people analytics technology company that uses big data to optimize organizational performance, providing executives visibility into the daily activities and relationships that propel business forward. VoloMetrix's technology helps improve companies' organizational alignment, drive sales, and promote employee engagement. Working with Fortune 100 companies, VoloMetrix extracts and analyzes anonymous aggregated collaboration data to reveal unprecedented insights into how employee behaviors drive business outcomes. For more information, please visit: www.volometrix.com.