Meeting Load

What it is: The number of hours spent in meetings, on average for a team and for individuals. You can view either Out-of-hours meetings (meetings outside of the individual’s preferred working hours), or All meetings (which includes meetings during and outside of working hours).

You will need to integrate with Google Workspace to get this metric.‍

Why it matters: 78% of people surveyed by Atlassian said they’re expected to attend so many meetings that it’s hard to get their work done. This leads to people working overtime to make up for time spent in meetings and feeling more drained at the end of a meeting-heavy day.

How we calculate it: We find all eligible meetings in each person’s calendar and calculate their time based on the start and end time.

We exclude the following events from our categorisation of meetings:

• Events with a single attendee - this means that if you use your calendar for time blocking or personal reminders, that won’t affect our calculations.

• Events that are over 12 hours - as these are usually placeholders for things like strategy days

• Events marked as "free" or "maybe"/"tentative" - even if multiple people have accepted the event invite

• Non-meeting event types, such as 'focus time'

If two eligible meetings overlap, we count them both as meeting hours in the Meeting Load chart. This may result in a higher than expected count of hours. For example, two overlapping 1 hour meetings would result in a Meeting Load count of 2 hours.

Note that this is different from our approach with Focus Time, because here we’re focusing on meeting burden. Although an individual can only be in one meeting at a time, this approach reflects the load placed on a team member when they are expected in overlapping meetings, as this creates additional work for them to figure out which meeting to attend and communicate that to the organizers.

For the Out-of-hours meetings calculation, we look at meetings that happened outside of someone’s working hours. By default, working hours are set to 8am-6pm weekdays, local time. To support flexible hours, our metric is configurable for different time zones and different preferred working hours and days on each team member's profile in Settings. Changes to your working hours in Settings will flow through to the Meeting Load analysis.

How we handle Group Meetings in Outlook:

• If you and 1+ other person are both marked “Busy”, then it’s a meeting.

• If the event is Free/ Working Remotely / Tentative / Out of office, then we don’t count it as a meeting

How we handle private events

Events marked as "Private" will still be counted in your Meeting Load analysis but the Event Title and Attendees will be redacted.

We do not currently support private calendars. If your organisation has private calendar settings (where all members of the organisation can only see free/busy instead of details) you can redact all event details from Multitudes. Contact [e-mail] to enable this setting for your organisation.

What good looks like

We know some meetings are necessary, but the more meetings people have, the harder it is to get other work done, and they may end up feeling drained. That’s why we recommend no more than 15 hours/week – or 3 hours/day – of meetings for your team members.

Out-of-hours meetings can be hard to avoid for globally-distributed teams. However, it’s important to keep an eye on so that people don’t continuously have to join meetings that stretch out their work days or disrupt their sleep. Here, we recommend no more than 2 hours/week of out-of-hours meetings – so that your teams can do a meeting or two with people in other timezones, but not more than that.