The commonly held belief that remote and hybrid work has caused employees to be overwhelmed with too many online meetings, resulting in burnout and lower performance, is a myth, according to a world-first report analyzing Microsoft 365 & Microsoft Teams usage.

Only 1% of employees have “meeting overload”, with five or more Microsoft Teams meetings each day, and less than 17% of people using M365 have more than two meetings a day on Microsoft Teams.

These are the findings from SWOOP Analytics’ analysis of the real-time M365 interactions of more than 266,000 employees across 19 organizations, along with more than 67,000 teams in Microsoft Teams across 17 organizations.

SWOOP Analytics’ data found less than an hour a day is spent in Microsoft Teams meetings, on average, across the active users analyzed.

Meanwhile, email continues to dominate time in the digital workplace. Most employees spend the equivalent of a full working day a week in email.

SWOOP’s analysis found employees spend 80 minutes a day reading email, the most time-consuming activity on M365. Another 25 minutes a day is spent sending emails. That’s one hour and 45 minutes every day spent in email.

Other findings include:

• 76% of people using Microsoft Teams don’t use Teams channels to collaborate.
• 71% of staff have not posted in a Viva Engage (Yammer) community.
• Almost 25% of all employees using Microsoft Teams have not sent or received chat messages.
• SWOOP’s return on investment calculations found that if employees improve their digital collaboration habits on M365 it would equate to an increase in the workforce of 4.5%.

SWOOP Analytics’ 2023 M365 & Microsoft Teams Benchmarking Report found most people are still not using even the most basic collaboration features in Microsoft 365. The gap between what is possible, and what most people actually do, is extreme.

In the three-month study period, 241 million Microsoft Teams chat messages were sent versus less than one million Microsoft Teams channel messages. There is a real risk that important enterprise knowledge will be lost in Microsoft Teams chat.

In good news, SWOOP’s 2023 analysis found significant improvements in collaboration across some M365 tools in the past 12 months, despite the return to the office, with more people using Microsoft Teams channels, more guests joining Teams and greater file sharing.

Unlike traditional benchmarking, which typically relies on surveying opinions, SWOOP Analytics  captures actual online interactions from all employees who use M365 or Microsoft Teams.

“While it is true that a small minority of people suffer from too many meetings, our data clearly shows the big challenge is the vast majority of people who have low adoption of the Microsoft collaboration tools,” said SWOOP Analytics CEO Cai Kjaer.

“This means organizations don’t have the digital dexterity required for business transformation and hybrid work.

“Only with analytics and measurement can you set a course for faster business benefit realization.”

In the full report, SWOOP provides guidelines and measurements to improve and compare M365 and Microsoft Teams network performance.

Download the report at: https://www.swoopanalytics.com/m365-teams-bm-2023

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