Meeting Overload Or Not, There's Still Room To Improve Collaboration
In 2022, my firm completed our inaugural benchmarking of Microsoft 365 use for collaboration. One key finding from this study was a lack of evidence for the enduring narrative that employees are overloaded with virtual meetings. We’rere currently developing our second M365 benchmarking report, this time collecting data from more than 125,000 employees across 19 organizations — and once again, we find no evidence of the overload that many workplace surveys are claiming.
Less than 1% of employees had on average 5 or more meetings per day, while 85% had 2 or fewer meetings per day. In fact, we found the top 25% of employees spending time in meetings averaged 1.6 meeting hours per work day. Microsoft’s own most recent Work trends report corroborated this finding: Their workplace analytics found “the heaviest meeting users (top 25%) spend 7.5 hours a week in meetings,” an average of around 1.5 hours each work day.
How can we rationalize such a disparity of results?
We use a workplace analytics approach, bringing together advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to analyze and interpret various types of data related to employee behavior, work patterns and productivity. This tactic analyzes the online activity of all employees with M365 accounts, while surveys can only gather data from those who choose to respond. Some employees are definitely experiencing meeting overload and stress, but workplace surveys and analytics studies paint vastly different pictures. Are the survey respondents really representative of the entire workforce, or are workplace analytics missing stresses that are not reflected in the data?
Rob Cross, professor of global leadership at Babson College, correctly identifies that only a small proportion of employees — 3% to 5% — carry the bulk of responsibility for value-adding collaborative work. While we believe organizations should take steps to reduce reliance on these potentially overloaded employees, we also feel that targeting them alone overlooks the "silent majority" of non-collaborating employees, who may be the cause of overload for their line managers in the first place.
Identifying Overloaded Employees
The "silent majority" of employees spend very little time collaborating online. After filtering out “non-people” Microsoft 365 accounts, including only accounts that had at least one meeting in a three month period, we found that 75% of employees spent less than one hour per day in calls or meetings. Roughly the same number, 76%, had not been active in a Teams channel and 23% had not participated in a Teams Chat. Over a three-month period, 71% had not been active in Viva Engage (Yammer), other than just reading.
We speculate that the "overloaded" employees are likely hybrid working people managers who are struggling to manage this non-collaborating silent majority. It's important to note that these are not public-facing or factory floor workers who aren't expected to collaborate online at all: Our analysis only includes accounts that showed at least some activity in any M365 function, such as Email, Meetings, Chat, Channels or Viva Engage.
Therefore, while supporting overloaded employees is important, simply tackling meeting quantity or quality may not address the root cause of workplace stress. Instead, organizations should focus on targeting the silent majority of non-collaborating employees by providing support programs that address their needs. By doing so, organizations can reduce the workload of managers and support the entire workforce.
Learning Opportunities
If we follow the enduring narrative that most employees are suffering from meeting or digital overload, interventions specifically designed for overloaded employees — such as. no meetings days, load shifting, wellness breaks and so on — will be applied to all employees, rather than just the 1% who need this support. In the meantime, the low collaborating employees challenge continues, effectively adding even more fuel to the fire.
Tackling The Root Cause of Low Collaborating Employees
While some employees prefer to work solo and not collaborate, they are not necessarily idle. They may be engaged in highly codified work managed by specific applications, such as call center, service center or retail employees.
Our research has shown that over 80% of employees read posts on Viva Engage (Yammer), indicating that leaders can engage these employees more actively by asking questions and establishing communities of practice. Public-facing workers in retail, transport and hospitality have also been found to be active participants in Viva Engage, despite spending most of their time on the "shop floor."
For hybrid working employees, it is important to have regular interactions with close colleagues to sustain a feeling of inclusion and benefit from process exceptions. One way functional leaders can facilitate discussion and collaboration is by establishing a digital team for their function.
For project or service teams that require more intense collaboration, it’s important to engage all team members. Our workplace analytics AI classification systems have identified a growth in self-directed teams, which can relieve hybrid middle managers of day-to-day team management and free them to connect between teams and senior executives.
About the Author
Laurence Lock Lee is the co-founder and chief scientist at Swoop Analytics, a firm specializing in online social networking analytics. He previously held senior positions in research, management and technology consulting at BHP Billiton, Computer Sciences Corporation and Optimice.
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