Productivity Tips: How to measure this productivity shift? Zoom problems, Teams and Webex surge.

Due to the Coronavirus, companies are faced with the unique challenge of implementing a digital workplace overnight. With Working From Home (WFH) now being the norm for the foreseeable future, we all use video conferencing and collaboration tools to do it.

• Even though Zoom CEO Eric Yuan says it's among the fastest downloading apps in the world, Zoom sudden spike in popularity is revealing its privacy problems. Should we panic and flock to other tools? Well, it’s important to have backup, but not to panic... Keep on Zooming.
• Slack launches call integrations with Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and more, this is exactly what every Slack addict needs. Slack is really not built for scale audio calling. Its online calling features are still extremely behind the market. So great to integrate some Pro tools like Zoom, Teams, and Webex. More integrations = more love...
• In Webex, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins says people spent 550 million meeting minutes per day. That's about 1000 years a day in meetings… Wow… We are wondering when its OK to borrow the Webex office boards for home office, as we love them.
• Meanwhile, Microsoft Teams is also reporting a huge increase in usage. Apparently Teams have 900 million meeting minutes per day - that's 1700 years per day - a bit more than Webex… Microsoft is also reporting more users in Skype, which has been nearly forgotten and replaced by combinations of Facetime, Zoom, and other social networks launching their own features...

The Topic of Today: Measuring Working from Home - how to keep up as a CEO

Work from Home across an entire organisation requires massive change for companies to accommodate it at scale.

We're probably behind step one - To get everyone the hardware and software to be able to do it. Some companies succeeded, others bombed, overloaded their corporate VPNs and on-premise set-ups, only to land in Zoom, Webex, and Microsoft Teams set-ups - where they should have been in the first place. Companies quickly realised that their big meetings of 5+ people can’t really be done on WhatsApp or Facetime, and quickly got reasonable.

At Time is Ltd. we have made an amazing effort in the past weeks to be able to deploy dashboards to understand these video conferencing platforms usage. When you use the platform’s native analytics, you see overall use by the company, but we wanted to help break it down into teams - and give people advice on how to really measure engagement of teams in home office (and not be creepy about it - respect individuals and aggregate by teams!).

How To Build a Working Digital Workplace and Analytics Around It

After companies went through their initial business continuity assessments, replanning, and resetting business targets - now it's time to focus on the people. Initially we all thought remote working would bring more focus, and more time to do my job from home where possible. This would be a great thing! But it seems that most of the overhead has remained in group video conferences instead, and in fact some people tell me they just wake up, put on a shirt, and go back to back till late night...

1. Maybe your remote teams could be over communicating due to an absence of the right remote working policies - maybe some of those 60 minute video conferences could be Slack messages instead...
2. Maybe they aren’t properly onboarded with the right solutions or could be potentially using programs that are not approved.

We have created a set of metrics to help companies understand these usage patterns. As many companies were not prepared to handle the new norm of a remote workplace - they weren't ready to asses the productivity. Now it's time for KPIs to understand what we are doing, right?

How does the use of online meeting tools differ by department? Online meetings are defined as meetings that include any service enabling remote cooperation, e.g., Webex, Zoom, Hangouts, and MS Teams etc.

The KPIs to Measure Remote Team Management

Clearly, you can start with simple metrics from your existing systems and solutions like Webex, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Hangouts. Their reports cover basic metrics like usage, volume, and active users. These reports can give you a basic idea of how well your teams use these tools.

However, these numbers won't show you everything because you won’t be able to compare them in context. With the metrics we built into our platform, you can pull data from these collaboration tools into one place and enrich the data with an HR table to get a more comprehensive view of what’s going on - team by team.

Our platform empowers you to measure the success of your digital transformation over time.

Such KPIs can help provide better insights in order to be able to:

1. Compare the online meetings and relations of teams before, during, and after
2. Understand the proportion of online meetings, team by team
3. Monitor the proportion of online meetings and how they change over time
4. Identify the teams involved in online meetings by department
5. See the percentage of people having online meetings and to what degree  
6. Observe how the proportion of online meetings change over time
7. Recognise how each department utilizes online meeting tools

Discover Where the Challenges Are for Your Company

Our proprietary KPIs/Metrics can help you get a clear picture of your digital environment. Sociomapping visualises the current and optimal team set-up, and reveals potential pain points. These data-driven insights can help you build better physical and digital workspaces so digital transformation can take place. See how your traditional hierarchy works in reality with communication pattern data using Organisational Network Analysis (ONA).

How did online communication change the frequency of interactions between teams?

How To Measure WFH Readiness

Making sense of remote work and managing your team effectively is extremely difficult without the right tools and data. Understanding whether your teams collaborate efficiently will be the key to success. Companies that will understand if this transition worked will be better equipped even when people do come back to their offices over the next few months.

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What are we up to at Time is Ltd.?

• We just released the agile transformation measurement whitepaper
• Our platform now has video conferencing measurement capabilities for Zoom and Webex enabling us to aggregate not only scheduled time but also how fast teams assemble
• Our platform also now has the first team email analytics - helping companies understand common issues like big threads, CC emails, and first insights are not surprising, but shocking…
• We also integrated 1:1 meetings and agenda detection - to see if meetings have agendas, and alerting on trends
• Our free Org Chart has an automatic import from G Suite
• We will be launching a Salesforce Sociomap plugin soon - to map accounts

Time is Ltd.(read: time is limited) is an advanced analytical SaaS platform that provides a holistic view of organizational time management. Measure your team’s online collaboration to improve communication and your bottom line and save precious time. By connecting to your existing tools via API, our platform digests the data and identifies signals that reveal how companies communicate and use collaboration tools. Our privacy-minded approach only aggregates (team-level) meta-data from a variety of data sources. See how well your teams work with your collaboration tools to get them up and running as fast as possible. Contact me here on LinkedIn if you want to find out more!