Relationships, FindTime and Scheduler

Meetings, meeting, meetings

Many folks I speak to are shocked at the number of meetings that are going on, each day, inside their organization. They are aware of the broad causes of the behavior but feel powerless in many cases to push back. It is causing real pain, burnout and transitions across multiple industries that employ knowledge workers.

Part of the pain can be avoided.

Let's start with a caveat - in most cases, changing a cultural behavior is extremely difficult. Simply implementing a tool isn't going to immediately prompt folks to behave differently. Where tools are useful are in two spaces:

• Making the?default?behavior easier for regular folks (i.e., a nudge)
• Solving a problem that used to be difficult and took up time from everyone

The good news is that meetings fall into this category. Let's be clear though: I'm not talking about a?laundry list of meeting best practices?that everyone should adopt. Those are all important things for folks to adopt, and doing so, over time will reduce the pain from meetings. I'm talking about something, much, much simpler.

How do you schedule meetings today?

This seems like such a simple task - and yet with the increase in the number of meetings per day, the overhead associated with such a task has become a distinct drain on productivity. I'll explore three options to help reduce that overhead in a second, but let's start with the basics that most of us use today - using nothing so much as your calendar, and the renamed "Scheduling Assistant" in Outlook or the?better Scheduling Assistant inside Teams. Either of these is a good baseline. What do you get?

• Insight into everyone inside your organization's free/busy information
• The ability to quickly book meetings at times when stakeholders are free

That's not to say the default method is without flaws. There are a few gaps in this scenario and several pre-requisites to using the service. Let's start with the pre-requisites, because as you'll see - many of the higher-level services solving for the gaps?still require these prerequisites?so if your office culture is one in which folks don't use calendars, you're never going to be able to save chunks of time and energy.

Pre-requisites to use basic calendar functionality for meetings:

1. All to-be-invited parties need to be using their Calendar in Outlook/Teams to keep track of their activities
2. To make free/busy work (and power the Scheduling Assistant) folks need to accept meetings they are going to attend and either ignore or decline meetings they aren't attending - if people leave everything as tentative or double/triple book themselves, you can't trust their calendar for when they are free
3. Everyone properly adjusts their work hours to reflect when they can hop onto calls (especially key in a global organization)

These three points seem simple, and many organizations think of this as basic, but I've met several organizations, where these simple tenets of Calendar hygiene are not universally known or observed. If you're in one of?those?organizations, it's going to take a lot of cultural shifts to get folks to adopt a more modern model. But let's say that you've already passed this - and everyone does those three items. You're all set, right? Unfortunately, the default model fails in several scenarios. Let's walk through the gaps:

• Your organization - this concept used to be simple - it was simply everyone hanging off the same Exchange server - but these days, many large organizations have acquired companies on different hosting platforms, so folks with the same person paying them might have multiple different email addresses - and the basic scenario doesn't let you schedule meetings with them and see their free/busy
• Partners and clients - even if everyone in your organization is on the same backend service, when you have meetings with clients and partners, you won't have access to?their free/busy?information - which makes your scheduling assistant fail again
• Edge cases - folks who are used to having executive assistants running things on separate calendars, or meetings with individuals who just have personal accounts because they are fresh out of college - these folks you can't see their true schedules either - which results in lots of emails going back and forth asking "hey, when are you free"
• Consensus building - often there are too many people in a meeting to get everyone to be able to attend - using regular scheduling assistant doesn't let you optimize for when others?prefer?to meet, or when you're trying to get just a percentage of folks to attend (e.g., 75%) and don't care specifically about who is showing up

To solve these higher order problems, I'm going to introduce three solutions Microsoft has built: Organization Relationships, FindTime and Scheduler. Each has good points and bad.

Organization Relationships

One of the oldest mechanisms to solving the org/partner/client challenge is also the most reliable: organization relationships. Ten years ago, this was referred to as "federation" so you may still see some people chat about it that way - in short this allows an organization to instantly connect with partners, clients and acquired businesses to share calendar data, at whatever level of granularity is preferred.

The good news with this approach is that from an IT perspective it is quite simple. If the two organizations agree to establish a relationship it only takes a few minutes to configure. For acquired organizations, it is an easy decision. The negative, of course, is that although it solves some of the scenarios above, it doesn't really address either the edge cases, or the consensus challenge.

FindTime

The simple solution to the consensus challenge is to implement?FindTime, which allows you to create?meeting polls?to gather interest. Whether folks are in your organization or across clients and partners - these polls allow folks to?vote?on their preferred time to meet, and it is especially useful for gathering a large set of stakeholders across multiple organizations. Rather than having fifty emails bouncing around, it often reduces that overhead to a single message, and by blocking out time on participants calendars until enough votes have been counted, ensures you aren't booking over potential meeting times.

The add-in to Outlook is free, simple to use, and for many clients and partners, something that is seen as a simple hurdle to speed up meeting time selection. There are only two negatives to using FindTime:

1. Some folks who have never used FindTime find it unfamiliar, and might not respond to the meeting poll; on the positive side - these folks wouldn't have even had any input before, so it still better than the default
2. Although FindTime reduces the amount of back-and-forth emails to setup a meeting, you as the meeting owner are still performing work to set things up - whether that means cutting off some folks from voting after a period, or selecting the initial times proposed, or accepting modified time proposals - so you're still performing overhead

That brings us to our last solution.

Scheduler

Scheduler, is an AI driven solution to scheduling meetings?with folks. Put simply, instead of delegating scheduling to a human, you send an email to Scheduler, and it handles what a human would typically do to set up a meeting. (So, all those back-and-forth emails still happen - you just don't see them!) The best part of Scheduler is that it makes it incredibly easy to setup calls with a remarkably diverse set of stakeholders, regardless of whether they are keeping their calendars up-to-date or otherwise - because it?asks participants?what times they'd prefer to meet, and then looks at your calendar to confirm you are able to do so.

Almost all of the scenarios are solved with Scheduler, so it's quite powerful. It's especially useful if you're setting up multiple small or 1:1 meetings, because the overhead to create numerous overlapping FindTime polls just to interview candidates, as an example, swiftly reduces the utility of that tool. Instead, by using Scheduler, each time it communicates with an individual it can check your calendar to ensure you are still free.

The negative? Unlike the other two solutions,?there is a cost. Having said that, it is important to keep in context where we have come from. In the not-so-distant past, workers relied upon executive assistants to set up meetings. When that transitioned to folks self-servicing, the actual time spent doing meeting scheduling didn't go away - it just went from the EA time to your own time. And I'm sure all of us can estimate that we've spent at least an hour or two over the past month performing the unglamorous job of scheduling a meeting across multiple participants. Is that worth the cost? You bet! Just do the math of your hourly bill rate and it becomes quite easy to see that use of Scheduler would save?you money, and time, if used widely at your organization.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are pros and cons to each solution. The more organizations that setup Organization Relationships, the easier the overall environment gets, but until that day, using both FindTime and Scheduler can help reduce the overall time spent on that most basic of tasks for everyone at your organization. Less time setting up meetings, hopefully means less time *in* meetings. So be sure to evangelize the?best practice tips for meetings?as well. That final tip in that section bears repeating:

Avoid holding a meeting just to update people. Decide if an email or a Teams announcement is enough.

Most of the time - a simple Teams announcement may be the best way to communicate as broadly as possible!