Seeking data on meetings at my company

[wilked]

Fortune 500 company... we have multiple sites that do similar thing.

How hard would it be to produce data such as:
-Average time spent per week in meetings (using Outlook data)
-The above, but separated by department
-Average number of participants per meeting
-Average length of meeting

And then compare against another site or two?

Assume we have standard Microsoft suite of apps (Outlook, Teams).

I am not in IT but am interested primarily in my role as site leadership team

Thanks

 

[Rudi Fingers]

Outlook's free/busy data is accessible to anyone who wants to analyze it in a company (by default). The first two questions you are asking (and possibly the last one, assuming meetings end when planned ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) can be turned into metrics based on aggregating free/busy data from people who keep their calendars accurate on Outlook. Years ago, someone at my company successfully played metrician with the Exchange free/busy data, but from a place of "enter a person's name and see how meeting-filled their days are"),

I can't vouch for this, but Microsoft has recently published some of the tools that they use to analyze calendar data themselves as "Power Apps" at https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/dynamics-365/microsoftcorporation1646417015013.calno?tab=Overview

There's a decent blog post describing the tool at https://www.microsoft.com/insidetrack/blog/transforming-how-microsoft-executives-use-their-time-with-microsoft-outlook-calendar-analytics/

 

[wilked]

Thanks!

Power Apps, I think that was what someone told me. Somehow I remembered it as Analytics which messed up my google searching. I'll take a look, thanks

 

[OfTheCarmen]

I know I personally accept/tentative a lot of meetings that I never actually end up attending. I cant imagine that's not a common practice among big companies and that would throw a ton of "noise" into this kind of information.

I think you'd be better off trying to get reports of how many people actually attended. I dont know if something like that is report-able from Teams or whatever collaboration solution your company uses.

 

[TomRicardo]

You can use Viva Insights as part of the Microsoft 365 Package. You can tie the data together with Power Apps. There are more granular pieces as well if you are looking. You can also use other tools, if you have questions feel free to DM.

 

[mwonow]

Do you have a friendly Excel guru? That person would definitely know how to extract data and analyze it.

OfTheCarmen has a good point, but I'd probably just assume that the rate of non-attendance was relatively consistent across sites, and state that up front as an assumption.

 

[AlNipper49]

There are tools that you can get that can analyze this. I get asked about them a few times a year. The issue will be, as it is with my clients, is that people like me will push back on giving god rights to something that is technically not essential. Your best bet is likely asking IT to spit out that crap into a CSV or something and do it in Excel. Mind you, this is probably not the best way, but it's probably the most effective way to determine how important this data is. If it's gobbled up by the decision makers then it will be much easier to push for a tool or development to get put into place.

 

[wilked]

Thanks. Will update if I am able to find something useful...

 

[LoweTek]

What are the outcomes you expect? What are you trying accomplish with the measurement? It sounds at first blush like a micromanagement activity. Perhaps I'm not seeing the value of it given the noisy results.

 

[Jim Ed Rice in HOF]

What are the outcomes you expect? What are you trying accomplish with the measurement? It sounds at first blush like a micromanagement activity. Perhaps I'm not seeing the value of it given the noisy results.

While not related to meetings, I’ve been on the receiving end of these corporate site comparison boondoggles as part of a site leadership team. Someone comes up with all this data, they put together some sort of metric, show sites ranked and then questions come to the sites of why are you lagging. Usually the site has no idea what data was used in compiling the metrics so they have to go asking where it came from. Then they have to dig into the data to determine if it’s accurate and then try to recreate it for their site and then explain why either the data sucks or why their site sucks.

The other possibility is corporate has determined that everyone spends too much time in meetings (they’re right) and are asking sites to put together a plan on how to reduce that but first the sites need to get a baseline so they can put a SMART goal together and measure the reduction for the current year goals and objectives.

Man, I can’t wait to retire.

 

[LoweTek]

"Do we make something important because we can measure it? Or, do we measure something because it's important?" - David Epstein

 

[wilked]

What are the outcomes you expect? What are you trying accomplish with the measurement? It sounds at first blush like a micromanagement activity. Perhaps I'm not seeing the value of it given the noisy results.

Expect? That we have too many people in too many meetings

Accomplish? Fewer people in meetings, fewer meetings

As of now I have a theory that since Covid, meeting attendance and count has ballooned with the move to Zoom/Teams. In the case of my site I think it's reducing efficiency / output of the site. I am hoping to quantify this somehow and try to change it.

I am seeing too often meetings with 20 people in them. Pre-Zoom it would be logistically very difficult to make this happen. Now it has become too common (at least in my current company). In those meetings, at least 10 people are off camera and never say a word. I could try and combat it with my anecdotal data, but I think it would be more powerful to have real data to speak to.