Remote friction, burnout signals, and why culture lives in the calendar
We used to walk into meeting rooms with coffee and chaos.Now? It’s “Can you hear me?” followed by 20 minutes of pretending someone's camera is broken.
Remote and hybrid work didn’t just shift our calendars - it shifted how culture gets expressed, ignored, or slowly lost in mute buttons.
And for all the hype around workplace transformation, most companies are still missing the signals hiding in plain sight - inside their meetings.
📆 Meetings used to happen. Now they need to be planned (and survived)
As HR Technologies UK pointed out: in remote teams, meetings aren’t “let’s chat” anymore - they’re events. They come with calendar invites, connection issues, and a growing number of participants who refuse to turn on cameras.
That may seem small, but it adds up - and not just technically. As Harvard Business Review recently noted, hybrid still isn’t working the way we hoped. Engagement is shaky. Communication is inconsistent. Expectations are misaligned. (HBR, July 2025)
Ulla doesn’t fix hybrid. But it does measure what hybrid is doing to your team.
😵 Burnout isn’t a vibe - it has data points
You don’t need a manager’s gut feeling to spot burnout.Just look at the meetings.
- 48% of employees say they leave vacation days unused.
- 70% of employees experiencing burnout say they’d consider quitting.
- Among US physicians, 70% work during vacation, correlating strongly with exhaustion.
(Sources: SHRM, Visier, HBR, UC San Diego)
Here’s what this looks like inside Ulla:
Imagine a team member who’s been passive, disengaged, or emotionally flat during meetings for weeks.Then they take a real break.They come back - and suddenly they’re asking questions, showing energy, and collaborating again.
That’s not just a nice anecdote. That’s measurable recovery. And it can flag who needs a break before it turns into a resignation.
🕵️♀️ Trust is easier to break than to rebuild
Let’s be real - monitoring employees is tricky territory.
As Terry Lees, HR Director at NFP, said in an HR Magazine interview:
“Trust is a critical part of any productive, engaged, results-focused team. And it can be quickly damaged - or destroyed - by poorly implemented monitoring systems.”
That’s why Ulla isn’t about surveillance. It’s about visibility.Before rolling out our tools, we help teams explain:
- What data is collected
- Why it matters
- And how it helps them, not just the business
Because workplace analytics should support performance - not pressure people.
📊 Red flags have metrics now
Here are some typical signals teams discover with Ulla:
🟠Situation: One person speaks 80% of the time
🔍What Ulla shows: High Gini Coefficient
📣What it means: Power imbalance, low team inclusion
🟠Situation: 3 meetings a day, zero participation
🔍What Ulla shows: Low engagement + high calendar density
📣What it means: Burnout risk, process overload
🟠Situation: All meetings feel vague and inconclusive
🔍What Ulla shows: Low clarity score
📣What it means: Communication breakdown, misaligned expectations
🟠Situation: Post-vacation energy spike
🔍What Ulla shows: Increased engagement & clarity
📣What it means: The vacation worked. Let them take more.
TL;DR
- Your meetings already reflect your company’s energy, culture, and health - whether you’re measuring it or not.
- Ulla doesn’t just summarize what was said. It shows how people interacted, how engaged they were, and how clearly they communicated.
- Tech won’t fix broken culture - but it can spot the cracks before they get worse.
Culture doesn’t live in your values page.It lives in your 10:30 meeting with 6 people and 0 participation.
Ulla sees that.Do you?