Clarifying meeting hour value

[felipe_archila]

Hi Community,

My colleagues and I were trying to reconcile the Audio minutes in Teams Admin Center with the meeting hours within Advanced Insights, and I wanted to clarify how meeting hours are calculated / retrieved.

Is it just the scheduled length of the meeting in Outlook? i.e. I have a 1-hour block, which is a Teams meeting, during which my team and I spoke for 45 minutes (we ended early!). Within Teams admin center, I would suspect all our audio time would appear as 45:00, but would that meeting appear in my corresponding Person query as 1 meeting hour? Corollary to that, in the Meeting query, attendee meeting hours would be 1 hour * # of attendees?

Thanks!

[Jake_Caddes · Accepted solution]

Hi @felipe_archila, I can't speak to the Teams Admin Center but here is the definition of how meeting hours are calculated within Advanced Insights: Number of hours the person spent in meetings with at least one other person during and outside of working hours.

If the meeting was on the employees' calendars for 1 hour and both accepted and attended it would register in the Person Query as 1 meeting hour. 

Attendee meeting hours would be 1 hour * # of attendees, yes that is correct. Here is the definition of attendee meeting hours: Total number of adjusted meeting hours for all attendees.
A meeting query focuses on the meeting as the main entity and reports on the various meeting attributes; a person query looks from a person's perspective and aggregates multiple meetings for the selected time period. Because the two query types have different purposes, their output also differs.

You can also refer to this document: Metric definitions | Microsoft Docs

[felipe_archila]

Hi @Jake_Caddes , this is massively helpful. Just one point of clarification: when you say "both accepted and attended", if it was an in-person meeting with no Teams component, would accepting and not canceling count as having attended?

Thanks!

[Jake_Caddes]

Yes I believe so, any meeting on an employee's calendar that they accept factors into the metrics surrounding meetings. 

[Diogo_Sequeira]

Hi Jake! I have a follow-up question regarding this topic. You wrote on your comment:

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@Jake_Caddes wrote:

If the meeting was on the employees' calendars for 1 hour and both accepted and attended it would register in the Person Query as 1 meeting hour.

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My interpretation of your comment is that this meeting is only considered for the calculation of meeting hours when the person actually attends the meeting and not just accepts the invitation, is that correct?

Regarding hybrid meetings, where only one person in the room connects to the online Teams meeting, how is the meeting time calculated for the participants who attended the meeting in-person but didn't join the online Teams meeting?

Thanks a lot! Would be amazing if I could get an answer ASAP since we kicked-off a Viva Insights project with a client last week and need to make sure there are no unanswered questions 🙂

[Jake_Caddes]

Hi @Diogo_Sequeira, currently meeting hours are exclusively tracked on the Outlook calendar, regardless of whether it's attended in person, or online, or frankly, not at all. It would consider a no response and tentative accept as meeting attends, and therefore meeting hours.

[Diogo_Sequeira]

Hi Jake,

Thanks for your response. Following up on this topic, my team found some paragraphs in the documentation that are not exactly clear and contradict the definition of considering "a no response and tentative accept as meeting attends, and therefore meeting hours".

On the page of Meeting Exclusions it is stated that:

"The following meeting types are excluded from meeting metrics:"

According to this statement, meetings accepted as Tentative would normally be excluded from meeting metrics, right?

Additionally, on the page Select exclusion type it is stated that:

"If you add no attendee exclusions, meeting attendance means only one thing: that a person accepted the meeting invitation. However, by creating an attendee exclusion, you can change that definition to also include
either or both of the invitee actions "tentative" and "no response.""

However, on another page it is said the opposite (in agreement with you) that "invitees who accepted a meeting invitation as "Tentative" would normally be included in analysis by default":

All in all, which page is actually correct? What is actually included in meeting hours? Does time "spent" in meetings include both "Tentative" and "No response" actions?

The documentation is very confusing and makes our job of presenting a clear and consise argumentation to our Client harder, and therefore fosters disbelief in the Viva Insights solution.

On top of that, I would also like to inquire about what is considered for Out-of-Office period? Are meetings scheduled for a period where the employee changed it status on "Outlook" to"Out-of-Office" excluded from total meeting hours?

Would really appreciate if someone would clarify this whole situation.

Thank you!

Diogo Sequeira

[Jake_Caddes]

Hi @Diogo_Sequeira, I have escalated this to our product team and they will get back to me or you with an answer. Thanks for your patience and I will relay your feedback on the documentation. I too sometimes find it confusing.

[Diogo_Sequeira]

Hi Jake,

Following up on this issue, are there any news?

Thanks

[Jake_Caddes]

Hi @Diogo_Sequeira, I apologize for the delay in getting back to you. So the default attendee exclusion in Argo is – We remove only declined responses by default and not tentative. So if an analyst wants to exclude tentative response, they will have to create an attendee exclusion and apply it.

[Diogo_Sequeira]

Thank you for the reply Jake! Also on the Out-of-Office issue, can you clarify? 

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@Diogo_Sequeira wrote:

On top of that, I would also like to inquire about what is considered for Out-of-Office period? Are meetings scheduled for a period where the employee changed it status on "Outlook" to"Out-of-Office" excluded from total meeting hours?

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Cheers!