#Microsoft #WorkplaceAnalytics #VivaInsights #Digitalworker #Workfromhome

In a work from home setup, first and foremost thing is to remain connected always during the working hours or in some cases beyond as well. There are a lot many number of tools of communication and collaboration that are available in the marketplace but no doubt Microsoft 365/Teams Zoom and Slack are the top players in this space.

For users, meetings (audio/video) via these tools are just the way of connecting with fellow workers external or internal and to get the work done but for organizations they are also means to gauge employee and organization productivity. And it is becoming ever more challenging – to understand and capture the right telemetry data from collaboration tools and enterprise application and the new ways of working.

Workplace Analytics(WPA) is the Microsoft response to this problem statement. Workplace Analytics or now called Viva Insights uses data from everyday work in Microsoft 365 to identify collaboration patterns that impact productivity, workforce effectiveness, and employee engagement. But even WPA depends on quality of underline data set and if users do not follow good practices of meeting scheduling and acceptance this will lead to exclusion of useful data points from the analysis.

A User’s calendar and email can contain a diverse set of activities (such as personal meetings, work-related social activities, all-day training meetings, and so forth) that are not relevant to work-related collaboration, and, if included in the metrics, would skew query results.

Keeping this in mind, I have tried to identify top 10 healthy habits of calendar management which can without doubt not only improve employee productivity but also help towards improving quality of the calendar data for analysis leveraging WPA.

1. Define your working hour window in your calendar.
2. While scheduling meetings with add keywords and purpose in the subject line.
3. Meeting Subject keywords should be inline with meeting agenda in general and business function process in particular.
4. Block daily time in your calendars as focus-time for yourself to do deep-dive work.
5. Reduce the number of excessive meetings from the calendar with more than 10-12 participants.
6. Try to not book meetings or have ad hoc meetings in your personal time outside your defined work window.
7. Always respond to the meeting invites with suitable options Accept, Tentative or Decline.
8. Convert non business related scheduled meetings in calendars to ad-hoc chat/call discussions
9. Avoid scenarios of double meetings booking in your calendars
10. Avoid booking your calendar time via meetings. Choose appropriate type : appointment and meetings in the outlook for the required scenarios.

Happy Meeting!

Please let me know your experiences.