Approach:

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That’s when he partnered with Time is Ltd. With this employee engagement and productivity solution, he received "anonymized and top-down insights on our cultural collaboration patterns." He looked at email behavior, digging into metrics such as how frequently "Reply to all" emails were occurring. He looked at meeting behavior and received insights such as how frequently focused time was interrupted by a meeting. Or whether "short meetings" were dragging on longer than they should.

When all was said and done, his team had deeply analyzed more than 100 metrics. And as he put it, "the findings weren’t all that surprising. You’d probably see the same in your team, in your company as well." And here were just a few of the findings:

1. Too many meetings.
2. Too many meeting participants.
3. Email volume was out of control.
4. But everyone felt the need to be included in email threads.
5. And those email threads could go on forever, and "Reply all" was the norm.

So now they had the data. They could quantify the problem. But everyone was asking them "what do we do now? How do we change this? What’s the second step?"

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Outcomes:

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They quickly found out the "second step" was encouraging change around their collaboration culture. By measuring their own collaboration data, sharing insights with key stakeholders, and introducing communication recommendations. They started to see bottom-up change around how people met, emailed, and worked.

They started trying to make incremental productivity gains surrounding ineffective communication behavior. Some examples of this were that they drafted and distributed tips on how to work with meetings and email. From this employees started adopting these best practices. The result was that employees' schedules started to become less interrupted. Their focus time went up. The entire team cut back on overwhelming activities that lead to burnout and lower productivity. Instead, they focused more work time on the tasks and projects they were hired to do. Not only did their effectiveness increase, but they also saw employee engagement go up.

Now with Time is Ltd. they have the data they need. The data to produce better results. They have the necessary insights to implement new policies and then track how these positively impact performance, well-being, and output.

Results:

• Decreased multitasking by 12%.
• Back-to-back meetings decrease by 21%.
• Decreases total number of emails sent by 10%.
• The number of people using time blockers went from 77% to 87%.
• More employees are willing to decline meetings that are not relevant to them. 19% increase in meeting decline rate.