Syncing your employees’ meeting events with Insightful creates a unified view of employee meeting schedules and computer activities. Managers not only have insight into the time spent on meetings but can also differentiate the idle time that happens during the meetings and count, what is now called Meeting Passive Time as a productive activity when calculating utilization.
To set up a calendar integration in Insightful, go to Settings → Integrations and select the Calendar tab, where you’ll see an option for Google Calendar integration.
To activate the calendar integration, you must have Admin access to both the Google calendar and Insightful.
Only one calendar integration can be active at a time.
How to Set Up the Integration
Select Configure Integration under the Google Calendar. This action will begin the integration process.
2. A pop-up will prompt you to sign in to your Google account and accept the integration. Once authorized, Insightful will automatically match your employees between the two platforms and pull in meeting data.
3. You can deactivate the integration at any time to stop syncing the meeting event data from your calendar into Insightful.
The system performs automatic employee matching based on multiple parameters, which include: Email, AliasID, Username, and Employee Name.
Which Meeting Events Do We Sync?
Calendar event type requirements
we sync only Meeting type calendar events
we do not sync Focus Time, Out of Office. etc. type calendar events
Meeting event requirements
we do not sync meetings longer than 8 hours
we do not sync meetings on days with a full-day Time Off entry in Insightful
we sync meetings accepted by the matched employee and at least one other person
we sync the shortest meeting if there are multiple eligible overlapping meetings
User type requirements
we sync only meetings for Employee user type
we do not sync meetings for Admins, Managers, or Clients user types
Integration state requirements
we sync only meetings for Employees on the Insightful platform who were automatically or manually matched with their counterpart profile on the calendar platform
we sync meetings from the moment the employee was matched
we do not sync meetings if the employee is later unmatched
we do not sync meetings if the integration is later deactivated
Timing based requirements
we sync meetings for matched employees every hour, pulling all meetings that meet the requirements and finished during the previous hour
we do not sync meetings scheduled in the future
we do not sync meetings added to the past retroactively (after an hourly sync has passed)
on the first sync, when the integration is established, we sync all eligible meetings for matched employees from the last 7 days
If you have suggestions for adjusting any of these meeting sync criteria, we welcome your feedback - feel free to contact us.
Meeting Events in Insightful
The purpose of Meeting Events in Insightful is to allow Managers to identify overlaps between computer activity and scheduled meetings, as well as to calculate the total number of hours occupied by meetings for each employee or team.
Any Idle time that occurs during a synced meeting will be converted into meeting passive time. Further details on how meeting passive time works with utilization are available later in this article. If there is any computer activity recorded during the meeting it will not be overwritten.
Meeting events will be handled the same way as manual entries when added to scheduled shifts - they will remain pending and will not appear on the user interface until the scheduled shift is completed. This prevents accidental creation of extra overlapping shifts and helps keep tracked time consistent and accurate.
Meeting Events on Activity Timeline
Meeting events are shown on the Activities page next to computer activities. This provides an additional layer of analysis for employee activities.
If multiple accepted, qualified meetings overlap, Insightful will sync the shorter event, as long as it meets all other syncing rules.
A yellow horizontal bar represents the duration of each calendar-synced meeting.
Meeting Details on Hover
On the activities page, you can hover over a meeting to view additional details about the meeting itself and the employee's activities during that time. What details are available:
Meeting Name (unless it is marked as private, those are marked with "Private Meeting" label).
Duration (start and end time).
Passive Meeting Time (if exists, aka if employee was Idle).
All computer activities are marked as Active Time.
Manual Time (if applicable to your org).
Break Time (if applicable to your org).
Top 3 Applications used during the meeting, if computer activity occurred.
Meeting Time in Insightful
Meeting Time is now available as an additional column in the tables on the following pages:
Employees
Individual Employee → Timesheets
Teams
Individual Team Pages
Time and Attendance → Timesheets
Meeting Passive Time in Insightful
Meeting Passive Time allows organizations to differentiate and treat idle time during meetings differently from idle time during other periods. For example, organizations can choose to include meeting passive time in utilization calculations, treating it as productive time. This feature provides flexibility in defining productivity metrics based on organizational needs.
Meeting Passive Time represents idle time that occurred during a scheduled meeting event. It has been integrated into all activity timelines and activity bar charts, ensuring visibility across the platform.
Activity Timeline and Meeting Passive Time
Activities Bar Charts and Meeting Passive Time
Meeting Passive Time in Insightful
Meeting Passive Time is now available as an additional column in the tables on the following pages:
Employees
Individual Employee → Timesheets
Teams
Individual Team Pages
Time and Attendance → Timesheets
Deactivating and Reactivating the Integration
Integration can be turned off anytime, retaining synced data but pausing future updates.
If you reactivate a calendar integration, Insightful will import only new calendar data or events, while keeping all previously added meeting information unchanged.
Reviewing matched employees for your integration
If employees are not automatically matched, you can easily review the list and manually match them. Ensure the required email address for matching is added to the employee's profile in Insightful.
When you have an active calendar integration, you can access this screen by navigating to: Settings → Integrations → Calendar Integration → Outlook Calendar → View.
