reduce wasted time in meetings
TRANSCRIPT
Ray Gillenwater CEO, SpeakUp
getspeakup.com @raygwater @getspeakup
Less Email and Fewer Meetings The Best Communication Tools and Processes at Work
Who Am I?
Co-Founder and CEO of SpeakUp
Ex Managing Director at BlackBerry
Student of Communications
I like the Execution* Definition
*Great book, check it out: Execution - The Discipline of Getting Things Done (Larry Bossidy)
• You need awesome people
• You need a great strategy
• You have to connect people to the strategy so that it’s more than
words on a page
How Do You Connect People + Strategy?
• With efficient operations. But there’s a catch:
• Operations have a fundamental requirement: communication
• Which poses a problem...
Most Companies Are Doing It Wrong
• Communication is sometimes one way (top down)
• Hopefully lateral
• And rarely bottom-up
Which Means…
• Companies are not tapping into the collective wisdom of their teams
• There is too much disorganized information, which slows down
decision making
• Most employees don’t put in extra effort - it’s too hard to make a
tangible impact
Some Symptoms Include:
Too many meetings
• 62 per employee per month
• 34% of time spent is wasted
• While 9/10 people admit to daydreaming
Too much unstructured chatter (signal vs. noise)
• Email, Skype, Hangouts, Slack, Hipchat
• 40% of your team’s time is spent on admin
So What Can You Do About It?
You need a set of communication guidelines that match your culture: • How: What tools - online/offline?
• Why: Coordination, updates, escalation, brainstorming?
• When: When are meetings acceptable? How soon should emails be replied to?
• Who: Depending on the above?
Tactics to experiment with (situation dependent): • “No meetings allowed” days
• Ban internal emails
Tools - Which Ones?
More can be done online, asynchronously
Be sure to cover three basic categories: 1. Day to day coordination and casual discussion
2. Consensus building & decision making
3. Managing & implementing decisions that were made
Litmus test: can you replace a meeting?
Casual Discussions & Coordination
Plenty of options: • Email (please no!), Slack, Hipchat, Chatter
• PICK ONE! Having to manage multiple = more overhead
• Get everyone onboard! Even those resistant to change.
Consensus Building & Decision Making
Not many options (that’s why we created SpeakUp)
Requirements we had in mind when we built SpeakUp: • Anyone can share an idea or a problem
• Conversations are structured
• Posts are votable to cut through clutter - focus team’s attention on important items
• Decision making is transparent so the team knows what decision was made and WHY
Managing & Implementing Decisions
Plenty of options: • Excel (please no!), Trello, Basecamp, Jira
• PICK ONE! Having to manage multiple = more overhead
• Get everyone onboard! Even those resistant to change.
What Do We Use At My Company?
For context: 15-20 people, across multiple global time-zones
Slack (internal email is banned) • To stay in touch and coordinate work in progress
SpeakUp (recurring meetings are few, impromptu is rare) • When someone has an idea for a new product, feature, marketing opportunity, etc
• When there is a problem and the solution is unclear (usually product or process)
Trello (everyone knows what their weekly priorities are) • To track decisions made in SpeakUp (it integrates with Trello)
• Assign status, priority, who’s working, what needs to to be done and by when
What Should You Use At Your Company?
• First gather the information: what’s your current situation?
• What are the major problems that need to be solved?
• What requirements must your process/tools meet?
• Establish processes and subscribe to tools that tick those boxes
...But please don’t call another meeting to discuss it!
Self-promotion: Use SpeakUp to capture & vote on problems, it’s free
What Should You Use At Your Company?
To execute, you need awesome people and a great strategy. But that’s not enough -
you need to connect people & strategy
To do so, you need effective operations - driven by communication • But communication isn’t just one way • And it doesn’t need to be in your inbox or in a meeting room
And if you fail to enable your people to execute they will: • Become paycheck collectors (only 13% of global employees are engaged) or • Sabotage everyone’s hard work (24% are actively disengaged) or • Go work somewhere else
Thank you!
Ray Gillenwater CEO, SpeakUp
getspeakup.com @raygwater @getspeakup
Feel free to contact me with questions