This Workplace Analytics dashboard provides a quick and easy way to conduct a broad diagnostic on 2 themes:
- company's "Collaboration culture"
- "Employee experience"
The pages related to “Collaboration culture” will shed light on the collaboration behavior for different organizations and organizational levels and will introduce opportunities to act on to decrease collaboration overload. The “Employee experience” related pages show emerging insights on employee well-being, as well as effective manager practices that may contribute to employee engagement.
Why it matters?
High levels of collaboration during working hours can force spillover collaboration into after-hours time, eroding employee morale and contributing to burnout over time.
Insights:
- Operations engineering organizations have the highest after-hours collaboration.
- Correlations appear to exist between percentage of workweek in collaboration and after-hours collaboration hours.
Why it matters?
Identifying and understanding differences in how organizations spend their collaboration time can shed light on broader differences between how teams get work done, and can in turn uncover both replicable best practices and areas of opportunity. At the same time, spotting patterns between certain types of collaboration and higher or lower after-hours collaboration time can reveal opportunities to improve work-life balance through small changes in the types of collaboration teams utilize.
Insights:
- Some organizations predominant collaboration modes deviate notably from the other organizations. Those differences are easily explained by business context, and is potentially worth of deeper inquiry for improvement.
- Correlations appear to exist between the collaboration types that organizations utilize and the prevalence of after-hours communication within those organizations.
Why it matters?
While some collaboration is best conducted through large or long meetings (e.g. all-hands, bloated, lengthy or workshop meetings), routinely using high consumption meeting practices can stall or hinder productivity and chip away at employee engagement over time.The proportion of meetings that are large, long, or both provides a glimpse into overall meeting effectiveness. Large or long meetings that are recurring tend to offer a high-value starting point for identifying opportunities to streamline.
Insights:
- 64% percentage of meeting time gets consumed by Lengthy, Bloated, Workshop and All hands meetings.
- 2o4k hours spend in long or large meetings, cost in terms of productivity equivalency is 94 FTE.
- 65% of proportions of long or large meetings are recurring.
Why it matters?
Analyzing meeting practices at the organization level can help pinpoint the root sources of meeting efficiency opportunities and inform early intervention points. It can also uncover organizational bright spots, where strong results suggest certain leaders are using best practices that could be replicated across the company.
Insights:
- Operations organizations spend the highest percentage of their meeting time in All hands meetings.
- Prevalence of each meeting type within each organization are easily explained by business context.
- Software organizations have streamlined meeting practices can be a replicable best practice for the rest of the company.
Why it matters?
In order to streamline meeting practices, a company needs to understand which organizations and/or levels within the company “generate” the most meeting time. Often, this analysis shows meeting time generated by some organizations and/or levels is not commensurate with their population size. Having this delta is expected; the question is whether the delta makes sense, based on the nature of the organizations or levels that generate outsized impact.
Insights:
- 20% a relatively small proportion of the employee population is generating an outsized percentage of meeting workload of around 82%.
- Most employees generate 38 meeting hours
- Within the subset of employees generating the most workload, Product management organizations and Mngr levels are most strongly represented.
Why it matters ?
Not all unscheduled time during the workday has the same productivity potential. Concentrated work blocks of 2+ hours enable employees to drive projects to completion more quickly than fragmented pockets of time. Consider: if fragmented hours enable half the productivity of focused work time, then 8 hours of fragmented time each week represents half a workday squandered – multiplied across every employee, every week. Small changes to calendaring practices can reduce fragmentation and unlock more productivity from the same number of available weekly hours.
Insights:
- Average meetings per week appear to correlate with average fragmented hours strongly.
- There are outlier organizations also, that buck the trend – meeting often without experiencing fragmentation.
- There are comparably sized organizations with similar meeting hours but different fragmentation levels.
- Organizations also with similar fragmentation levels but different meeting hours are present. So, these organizations have a best practices around calendar management or meeting discipline that others can learn from.
Why it matters ?
While multitasking rates will vary naturally based on meeting types and company dynamics, consistently high rates of multitasking suggest meetings are routinely not as effective as they could be, given that attendees are focused on other things. This analysis helps determine whether multitasking rates are more a function of employees’ habits or the consequence of high collaboration levels, driven by a necessity to catch up on emails during meetings because there isn’t enough other free time during the workday. If driven by habit, there may be opportunity to target interventions toward chronic multitaskers.
Insights:
- Weak correlation appears to be between total avg. collaboration hours and avg. multitasking rates.
- When comparing multitasking rates and multitasking dynamics across the organizations sales appears to be a chronic multitaskers, and startegy appears to be adversley impacted.
Why it matters ?
Recurring meetings with high multitasking rates often present the quickest, high-value opportunities to improve meeting effectiveness through two processes:
- revisiting attendee lists to ensure only teams/employees who truly need to be present are included, and
- revisiting meeting length and frequency to determine whether there are opportunities to reduce meeting cadence and/or duration.
Insights:
- Of the “low engagement” recurring meetings – "the fundraising", "tom the up" , "send project" stand out as easy starting points for reducing number of attendees, duration, or frequency of recurrence as those project extrmley high email per antdee hour compared to others.
Why it matters?
While email is the most effective tool for many business scenarios, it is often not the quickest or most direct way to answer short clarifying questions. As companies strive to become more nimble, this analysis gives a first-level view into potential opportunities to shift email correspondence toward more agile communication methods, like Teams chats & ad-hoc calls. When a high proportion of sent emails are 1-to-1 or 1-to-several, there’s likely opportunity to migrate some of that correspondence to chat, which enables quicker and more direct answers to questions.
Insights:
- 55% percentage of emails are sent to just one recipient.
- 33% percentage of emails are sent to 2-5 recipients.
Why it matters?
Consistently high after-hours demands can harm employee engagement and contribute to burnout. But after-hours collaboration is often less a reflection of deliberate scheduling choices and more a function of scheduling necessities – when collaboration hours consume so much of the workday that they force all other work into after-hours time. This analysis shows whether a “tipping point” exists – a collaboration hours threshold above which after-hours time spikes.
Insights:
- There is a strong and linear correlation between total collaboration hours and after-hours collaboration.
- There appears to be a “tipping point” of 16-24 hrs for collaboration hours, above which after-hours collaboration spikes.
Why it matters?
Employees who have both long workweek spans and high average weekly collaboration hours may be at risk of burnout; they are consistently collaborating the most hours, and those hours are extending over a significant swath of each week – regularly eating into time outside of working hours. This analysis shows where within the company the burnout risk is most acute, at both the IC and manager level.
Insights:
- At company wide if we look at burnout risk by manager and by IC, it seems like 33% of employee from mngr level have long span and high collab as compared to IC which have only 6% of long span and h9igh collab hrs.
- By organization and by level there appears to be 77% of higher and 10% of lower burnout risk pockets.
- Outside of the highest burnout risk category, there are notably high readings in workweek span.
Why it matters ?
Double-booked meetings have downstream impacts that hinder organizational agility. When employees prepare for meetings in which a key stakeholder’s decision is required, only to learn that the stakeholder was double-booked and chose to attend a different meeting, that preparation and scheduled meeting time for all attendees is wasted. This cycle of rescheduling has a snowball effect, leading to more meetings on the calendar, and driving up managers’ meeting hours. When managers’ meeting time increases, they are less available to meet 1:1 with their direct reports to provide strategic guidance.
Insights:
- Operations engineering organization have the highest rates of manager double-booking.
- A weak correlation appears to be between manager double-booking rate and increased manager meeting hours.
Why it matters?
Regular check-ins between employees and managers play an important role in driving employee engagement, alignment and role clarity. Research shows these meetings provide value when they take place for at least 15 minutes a week on average (equivalent to a 30-minute session every other week), and occur at least once every other week. The analyses above show average weekly 1:1 meeting time (left) and frequency of 1:1 meetings (right), split by organization.
Insights:
- 90 % of employees have no regular 1:1 time with their managers.
- 65 % have less than 15 mins/week.
- 14 % of employees meet with managers less than once a quarter.
- 6% less than once a month
Why it matters ?
While there will always be a proportion of meetings that both managers and their directs should attend, high rates of manager co-attendance in meetings can signal opportunities to simultaneously empower employees through greater autonomy and free up manager meeting time, so managers can focus on other more strategic tasks. Note: at some companies, there are some functions for which meeting attendance/manager co-attendance expectations vary from the broader norm; recognizing that nuance when comparing functions is important.
Insights:
- 78% of employees have high manger co-attendance rate, with operations engineering organization having most prevalent co-attendance at 89%.
- For the organizations where managers frequently co-attend, are average manager meeting hours also project high at 20.1 hours in metting.
- A reduction in co-attendance might help reduce manager meeting burden.
Why it matters ?
This analysis segments employees into four types based on the overlay of 1:1 meeting time and meeting co-attendance rate. The research-based premise is that the most engaged and successful employees have managers who regularly meet with them 1:1 but otherwise allow them to operate autonomously (these employees have “Coaching” managers). This overlay also shows what proportion of employees have managers who both meet 1:1 and co-attend meetings regularly (“Highly managed”), who seldom meet 1:1 but frequently co-attend (“Coattending”), and who seldom meet 1:1 and seldom co-attend (“Undercoached”).
Insights:
- 6% of employee proportion have high manager 1:1 minutes and low manager co-attendance.