👆 Gut wrenching, isn’t it?
If you relate to this picture, chances are you work for a medium or large organization.
If you feel a sense of relief, instead, you must hold a highly central role in a 100K+ employee giant multinational, with many more conflicts than the ugly calendar above.
I know my statement sounds like an exaggeration, however, I swear this is exactly what our largest customers and partners are lamenting about.
Here are just the latest two horrific examples, resulting from a couple of chats I had:
- An IT middle manager in a highly diversified multinational with a few hundred thousand employees, had 4 or 5 conflicting meetings for each single calendar slot.
- The day I met a Principal Product Manager working for a large technology giant, he had 7 conflicting meetings at 8:00 am, an absolute record!
In this post, we are going to figure out the impact of the obnoxious overbooking trend, and we will discuss whether the current AI-centric industry direction is (or will be) solving the urgent calendar overbooking issue.
“We’ve always worked this way.” But at what cost?
Over the years, many customer interactions taught me that, when an organization reaches a certain scale, the scheduling craziness spirals out of control, heavily affecting operations. It’s hard to find a general threshold beyond which calendars become an obstacle to productivity, rather than a catalyst. Such threshold varies based on multiple factors such as company culture, processes, roles, organizational chart, available technologies, vertical markets, and more.
I am sure you will agree with me on the general feeling that the company size tipping point above which meetings spiral out of control seems to be lowering over time, especially after 2020 hit hard and scheduling became the default engagement rule.
Overscheduling causes several adverse scenarios occurring across many company sizes, although with variable frequencies – the larger the organization, the more frequent the problem. Let’s see if you relate with any or all of these typical scenarios.
- You have to talk to a subject matter expert (SME) divided across multiple projects; her calendar is completely packed for several days in the future, and you desperately need her input before 5:00 pm tomorrow. You keep sending her instant messages (IM) or emails in vain, but she appears to be disregarding your messages completely. So you try scheduling an urgent meeting, knowing that it will conflict with existing events on her calendar, and you hope she’ll show up.
- You have to talk to your boss, you open the scheduling assistant and the earliest availability for both of you seems to be in 2 weeks from today. However, you really need your boss’s input as soon as possible to move forward with your urgent project, and you spend considerable time negotiating earlier slots with your boss’s Executive Assistant.
- You have to quickly talk to someone, but you don’t know whether that person is at the office, traveling or working remotely. Plus, their presence in the official collaboration tool is always busy “red”. You consider contacting that person via phone call, WhatsApp, Text, Email, Instant Message, but you don’t know what channel is appropriate; plus, you do not want to disturb your colleague or partner at the wrong moment and come across as pushy.
- You have to respond to a customer Request For Proposal (RFP) as soon as possible and you desperately need input from 5 colleagues, to show responsiveness and increase the chances of winning the deal. You open your colleagues’ shared calendars and you end up spending a lot of time to schedule five 30-min meetings over 2 weeks.
- An important urgent meeting has to happen within a certain time frame, and you have to go through several emails/meetings/calls to negotiate everyone’s availability for the main meeting to happen before the deadline.
- An invitation for a meeting with a partner has been sent a couple of weeks ago, however, the day before the meeting, your partner suggests rescheduling it 2 weeks later, due to new emerging priorities. This happens multiple times for the same meeting.
These are just some sample scenarios and do not certainly represent the totality of the wasteful workflows you and your colleagues “are paid” to go through. An important aspect to emphasize: in all of the above cases, and many more, you end up scheduling a meeting. It’s the only safe solution, which offers the highest chances of success, despite 40%-70% of the meetings being rescheduled – sometimes multiple times.
At Tweelin, we have calculated that, every day, just for 1:1 meetings, 260M hours are wasted worldwide to reach live conversations, resulting in a daily societal opportunity cost of $3.2B!
This calculation refers exclusively to the amount of time wasted in scheduling, rescheduling and cancellation activities, and it does not encompass the likely higher impact of missed revenue, caused by slow customer responses, longer project timelines and delayed decisions.
Current collaboration AI trends address the overscheduling symptoms, not the root cause
How do we solve this enormous waste of time and resources?
The bad news is: this calendar-centric way of working is so ingrained in our daily lives that many people do not even see the productivity bloodbath that comes with it.
The good news is: there are some interesting macro trends we are seeing in the market, and we will go through a few mainstream categories of solutions to deal with overscheduling.
Calendar Assistants
AI-powered solutions that aim at automating scheduling, rescheduling and cancellation processes. They play “Calendar Tetris” with your calendar events, optimizing your schedule by resolving conflicts and booking focus time.
Despite working well for not-so-busy people and smaller organizations, “traditional” calendar assistants fail to solve the overscheduling problem for medium to large organizations and their key actors – the ones everyone needs to talk to, who are gatekeepers of decisions and activities that matter.
In fact, try playing “Calendar Tetris” in calendars with multiple bookings for each single slot… Perhaps, the only effect will be spreading a few conflicting meetings over future openings, delaying decisions and leaving workers less time to focus during the day.
In-Meeting Assistants
How does in-meeting AI solve the overscheduling problem?
It doesn’t, however, context-aware meeting assistants allow workers to handle multiple bookings more efficiently.
In a nutshell, if you can’t attend the meeting, the AI will make sure you can stay involved by providing:
- Meeting summarization.
- Action items extraction, assignment and tracking.
- Proactive participant suggestion: understanding the context of what is being discussed and pulling-in people needed to move the needle forward.
- …and more.
In-meeting assistants are becoming increasingly context-aware, which makes them promising in terms of productivity increase potential.
However, they submit to the idea that people will not experience less meetings anytime soon, hence, the in-meeting assistants are making the content of such meetings readily available and well organized.
Unfortunately, there is a fatal flaw with this approach, which is becoming more and more evident for larger organizations: since key people have too many meetings and no time to work on the activities that matter, only a tiny percentage of them appear to be selectively consuming some of the content extracted and organized by the AI.
In other words, if you have 4 meetings for each single calendar slot, you will attend the most important of them (for you), but neither will you read the summary of the other three, nor will you necessarily execute the action items assigned to you in absentia.
This might not even be an AI adoption issue. In the end, key overbooked people have to do the work they are paid for with limited resources, and spending focus time to catch up on past meetings doesn’t seem to be a particularly productive strategy.
So, how do you bring someone important – who missed your meeting – up to speed? Chances are, it will happen through another meeting that will be scheduled in the future and likely rescheduled.
The only solution to overscheduling is simple: less meetings!
Having less calendar meetings makes a lot of intuitive sense.
However, if you have less meetings, how can you have enough interactions with your colleagues and partners, and move the needle efficiently?
If most of your interactions involve calendar meetings, then you surely won’t talk enough.
Hence, the key is having conversations without scheduled meetings.
The role of emails and instant messaging
Having conversations without scheduled meetings can somehow be achieved asynchronously through emails and IM, however, the larger the company, the less effective this strategy is:
- Likely, busy people – the ones you hope will open and read your messages – are drowning in unread emails and IMs, so communications fall through the cracks.
- Many interactive discussions are not suitable to be carried out asynchronously; how many times a 10 min conversation would have saved you hours of emails back and forth?
The ideal engagement experience
Now, I want you to think out of the box without considering any technology constraint. Please, answer this question:
If you had the magic wand, what would be the ideal communication engagement experience with your colleagues and partners?
Take a moment to answer before reading more… And please, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section! We are eager to learn from you.
My team and I asked ourselves this very same question 4 years ago, and answered as follows:
“If I had the magic wand I would think about talking to a colleague or partner, and then the conversation would magically happen at everyone’s earliest convenience with zero coordination needed.”
Imagine you had that capability in a medium or large organization, what would the advantages be?
- No scheduling/rescheduling/cancellation cost, more time to focus.
- Live communications independent from calendar availability, with the opportunity to accelerate conversations, which means accelerating decisions and contributions, thus moving the needle faster.
Dear skeptical friend, I know you might be thinking: “all good on paper… but people are busy and don’t take calls”.
True, unless we reinvent how conversations happen.
If all parties expect to talk, and the conversation truly happens at everyone’s earliest convenience, then unscheduled conversations may work.
A future of serendipitous interactions
At Tweelin, we have focused our AI efforts exactly in that direction and we built a proprietary enterprise AI that gets colleagues and partners to live instantaneous conversations effortlessly at the most appropriate time, through the best possible communication channel or app, without any calendar event.
Our solution leverages device OS telemetry combined with calendar availability to determine users’ true instant availability across all devices and apps.
We believe that our approach outperforms Calendar Assistants and In-Meeting AI, and it is the only viable way to:
- Reduce the overscheduling craziness
By connecting people serendipitously, scheduling, rescheduling and cancellation nonsense is avoided. - Free up time during the day to focus on what matters
Conversations adapt to the priority of your day, instead of you following a sequence of back to back calendar events scheduled in the past that clash with today’s priorities.
- Reduce friction
As a consequence of the previous point, people experience less friction between what they are scheduled to do and what they should be doing.
- Accelerate conversations, increase customer responsiveness and decision making speed
- Detaching communication from calendar slots allows conversations to happen much earlier than the earliest availability in common on a low resolution tool like a calendar.
- The telemetry-driven approach works around completely packed calendars and people always busy on IM tools, while it allows to exploit meeting cancellations and reclaim time from meetings that end earlier.
It’s time to work smarter—not longer.
Discover how Tweelin’s AI brings back serendipitous, high-impact conversations without the calendar chaos: https://tweelin.com/technology/