Team Wellbeing dashboard
Overview
The Team Wellbeing dashboard is an easy way to understand how much time an engineering team actually gets to do engineering versus time spent in meetings. Of course, not all meetings are bad; fragmented meetings have a significantly higher impact on an engineer's day, and meetings sometimes necessitate that work happens outside of working hours. All of these issues are easily identified via the Team Wellbeing dashboard.
Video walkthrough
Data sources
- Connected Calendar such as Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook 365 Calendar
- Connected online meeting tools such as Google Meet or Zoom
Filter
- Filter by Date
- Filter by Team
Maker time
Maker time is a stretch of 2 hours or more without any meetings, a.k.a., the focus time that is spent on work without distractions like meetings, etc. This metric is computed at an individual level and aggregated up to the team as a whole.
Ideally, you want the team to have high maker time on all days of the week i.e. you want to team have large chunks of unobstructed time so they can focus on building software. Hatica categorizes Maker times into 3 buckets:
- High Maker time: >75% of the work hours is maker time
- Medium Maker time: >60% of the work hours is maker time
- Low Maker time: <60% of the work hours is maker time
It is okay for teams to have some days of Medium or even Low Maker time; however, if this is a consistent pattern, it merits further investigation. Teams with Low & Medium Maker time will struggle to deliver their Sprint tasks due to the constant context switching that is needed.
This widget is also a great way of identifying & fixing fragmented meetings. For instance, if there are two 30-minute meetings, it is better to have them scheduled back-to-back because any free time in between those two meetings will probably be unproductive anyway—from the engineer's point of view. Take a case where there are 30-minute meetings every hour on the hour between 9 am & 1 pm; this results in the entire first half of the day being unproductive with no Maker time for the engineer.
So, in addition to having fewer meetings, it is beneficial to chunk meetings together or schedule them back-to-back.
Meeting hours
This widget highlights the average time teams are spending in meetings. Make sure to use a weekday filter in the Date range to have realistic data. Using a 7-day filter will result in lower meeting times being reported because weekends generally have fewer meetings! And consider the data for multiple weeks before drawing any conclusions.
It must be pointed out that not all meetings are bad, and the Meeting time breakdown surfaces meeting types. The meeting type breakdown can be configured via Communication settings (opens in a new tab). Using Event Tagging, meetings can be categorized based on the Meeting Subject/Title, using RegEx to specify the pattern to be matched to tag meetings.
Quiet days
Quiet days are workdays without any meetings or significant work outside working hours. This widget helps you identify overall well-being and potential signals of team burnout. Quiet days have the following thresholds:
- High Quiet days: If you’ve had meetings outside of work hours for <20% of your work day, it is classified as a highly quiet day
- Medium Quiet days: If you’ve had meetings outside of work hours for >20% and <30% of your work day, it is classified as a medium quiet day
- Low Quiet days: If you’ve had meetings outside of work hours for >30% of your work day, it is classified as a low quiet day
Meeting heatmap
The meeting heatmap is an overlay of the calendar of all members of the selected team and provides an aggregated view of when the team is spending time in meetings. Time slots with more meetings are indicated with a darker shade and all meetings outside working hours are highlighted with a contrasting color.
Use cases
- Understand average time spent in meetings
- Diagnose potential team burnout due to fragmented days or lack of quiet days
- Review meeting hotspots and recurring meetings
Insights
Use this dashboard to get insights irto the following
- How much time is spent in meetings?
- How much time does the team get to build software
- What type of meetings does the team participate in
- How much work happens outside of working hours
FAQ
Why is there no individual level filter?
Individual calendars can be seen within the respective calendaring tool - Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar. In addition, surfacing all meetings from an Individual's calendar opens up potential privacy risks. Hence, Hatica only surfaces aggregate meeting data.
Why is an Admin account needed?
Since Hatica is retrieving meeting data for all Team members, an Admin account is required. Hatica does not request Calendar permissions from every user, because that will inadvertently lead to data being missed for some users who have not provided the requisite permissions to Hatica. Also, with admin permissions, Hatica is able to retrieve meeting data for new team members without any additional intrervention.
Which calendars will Hatica read?
Hatica has permissions to read calendars for all users in your Google workspace or Office 365 tenant. However, Hatica queries calendar data only for users that are present in Hatica and have an email ID that is mapped to your organization. Users that are not present in Hatica, but are present in your Google workspace/Office 365 tenant, will not be queried and hence their meeting data will not be visible in Hatica. Additionally, users that are present in Hatica but do not have a corporate email ID attached to their Hatica account, will not be processed.
How does meeting detection work for offline meetings?
For in-person meetings, all members that have accepted the meeting are considered to have participated in the meeting.
How does meeting detection work for online meetings?
For online meetings, Hatica receives meeting participation data from Google Meet, Zoom and uses that to determine which meeting invitees participated and for how much duration they participated. Therefore, in a 1hour meeting, if a Hatica user John participated for 20 minutes, only 20 minutes of meeting time will be attributed to John and the remaining 40 minutes become eligible for Maker time computation.
If a user does not accept or decline a meeting invite, is the meeting considered for meeting time?
Only confirmed, accepted meeting invites are considered for meeting time calculations.
If a user responds with a Tentative/Maybe to a meeting invite, is the meeting consdering for meeting time?
Only confirmed, accepted meeting invites are considered for meeting time calculations. Meetings with a decline, tentative or no-response are not considered meeting time.
What are the default working hours & can this be configured?
The default working hours are 9am to 6pm and can be configured via Communication settings (opens in a new tab).
How does Hatica handle holidays?
There is no standard way to track holidays & there are any too many variations of holidays (planned time off, unplanned time off, Govt holidays etc). Hence, Hatica does not have a default holiday calendar, except Saturday & Sundays. That said, you can implement a rudimentary level of support for holidays by configuring Meeting Time Breakdown with defining Event Tagging. This needs the calendar of the org to be connected, in this the MIT calendar… So any holidays on a working day will have to be manually interpreted when viewing this dashboard.