You want this until it gets integrated into Microsoft Teams, management gets ahold of it, and now these pie charts are treated as an indication of your contributions to the company. Everyone is itching to talk as much as possible, dragging meetings on forever, a bunch of people saying absolutely nothing as insurance against when layoffs come around and a manager has to choose between 2 people roughly as valuable except... Hm... Bill contributes 3.8% less than Fred in meetings...

Every time I get an email from Microsoft Viva telling me about my productivity last week, I can't help but feel that's the direction we're heading.

I am a manager and am afraid of a future like this. To echo your point I caution everyone to be careful what kind of data you wish for because you just might get it. Over a long enough timeline the probability goes to 1 that it will be misused by management.

I would disagree that the kind of data being talked about lends itself to misuse. Management in general, and especially in well run companies, tends to be responsible and judicious in their use of various metrics and getting a good, holistic view of employee interactions and engagements is vital to ensuring that high performers are identified and adequately mentored. Ideally, this type of data could be paired with a sentiment analysis engine and an emotional identifying model that could help coach negative employees toward more positive and beneficial interactions. This is an area that would require a delicate balance to prevent misuse, but, given most HR departments hesitance to act without strong background information, it would likely be a net positive in nearly every case.

'scuse me I need to go wash my mouth with soap. I just gamed the metrics that would be produced with this and I feel dirty.

People that would make ridiculous decisions like that probably are already making insane decisions with the data they have currently. Why would one more data point hurt?

Slippery slopes aren't cliff sides, they are downward ramps.

Wow, I have been blissfully unaware of Microsoft Viva up until now. I guess Manna [1] came for knowledge workers first.

[1] https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

Viva doesn't tell you about your productivity. It reminds you about meetings you were in and commitments and follow-ups you might want to tend to.

In my 40+ year career I've never met a manager who would use such a vague 'metric' - even if it did exist - to choose between two hires.

Let me introduce you to: https://www.read.ai/

Which tracks real-time talk time among everyone, but also a lot of other statistics, analytics, and transcripts.

Works on meet, teams, zoom and webex. It just joins the meetings as an invitee (will automatically join any integrated calendars). So setup is nearly friction less.

Actual objective is to reduce meetings when possible and improve meetings where people must attend.

Afaik BBB has this feature since at least last year. It shows a room admin the time each participant talked etc. While it was intended for classrooms, I.e. participation in online classes by students, it should cover the same aspect here.

This would force me to contribute to useless meetings, while now I attend (look at him dutifully attending!) and in the meantime just do other work.

My favourite contributions to meetings are "Nothing to contribute that hasn't already been said". Like a breath of fresh air a light at the end of the tunnel.

It annoys me knowing that the indicator for good employees are those who give most ideas / contributions to a topic, while good executors with less idea for it is seen as worse.

The thing is it's usually a good one that give more contributions to make their progress / workflow smoother, not the other way around.

Jitsi Meet [1] has voice and video chat, screen sharing and speaker stats (showing speaker time) out of the box.

[1] https://meet.jit.si/

Maybe you need a better meeting format? We go round robin with our issues to tackle, host limits each to about five minutes.

Totally agreed.

Should be a standard feature imho.