Increased meeting efficiency in five meetings

Challenge to solve

For The Collective intelligence Group (TCIG) running efficient meetings means that;
• all attendees share accurate and relevant information concisely,
• all attendees participate in lively discussion around key items that are impacting the company achieving its objectives.

TCIG operates in multiple regions around the world so their leadership meetings are held virtually across multiple timezones.

Increasing meeting efficiency was made difficult by some attendees experiencing “meeting fatigue”. This was partly due to the difference in timezones; some attendees join the meeting at 7am whilst for others it would be 9pm. “Meeting fatigue” is also something that has been proven to have become more significant as more meetings have moved online since the beginning of the pandemic.

The other source of “meeting fatigue” is poor communication. Meeting topics running overtime can be the result of attendees not being prepared to give concise updates. When this happens people who don’t have the relevant numbers close at hand will instead give lengthy explanations or tell stories. This can turn a two minute update into a five minute monologue. This can lead to meeting fatigue not only for the storyteller but for all attendees. This saps time and energy away from the latter stages of the meeting and negatively impacts the effectiveness of the entire meeting.

Solution

People are often not aware of their own talk time and therefore not able to take personal responsibility for talking too much, going off topic or not talking at all. If the moderator of
the meeting takes on sole responsibility for timekeeping, interrupting a speaker and eliciting contribution from other attendees this can have a negative impact on the group dynamics and can lead to the moderator not having the extra bandwidth to be able to contribute in discussion.

The solution for TCIG was to measure objectively and precisely exactly who was talking about what during the leadership meetings by running Look Who’s Talking (LWT) during a normal meeting. LWT enabled TCIG to bring this information to the surface so that the team became aware of how they were using their time and energy.

Once TCIG became aware of the areas that could be improved they introduced tools to directly address these areas and used LWT to measure how effective the tools were. The tools TCIG introduced over the five meetings were:

• A clear agenda based on best practice (EOS)

• A platform for attendees to update their critical numbers and suggest items for discussion prior to the meeting (Traction Tools by EOS)

• LWT to monitor progress in real time and over the five meetings.

Objective measurement of attendee participation in real time

LWT enabled TCIG to bring this information to the surface so that the team became aware of how they were using their time and energy.

Results

LWT has greatly improved our adherence to the agenda. There has also been a shift in the team’s energy in meetings. Now attendees are participating more in discussion and showing less signs of meeting fatigue.

- Bradley Klaffer, CEO of TCIG

The results of TCIG’s leadership team becoming aware of their communication behaviour through LWT were that the attendees’ time and energy became focused on the critical issues impacting the business. This occurred over five meetings with no team members required to stop work to attend workshops or lectures. Business continued as per usual as the results were achieved.

Figure 2.

TCIG set a goal agenda for what they wanted to discuss in their meetings and for how long. LWT then showed how each meeting compared with their goal. As you can see from fig. 2 above by the fifth meeting the leadership team’s meetings began to match with their own set goals.

Figure 3.

The challenge was also to ensure all attendees engaged in discussing key issues and identify if “meeting fatigue” was affecting any of them.

Fig. 3 shows the balance of participation across all attendees for the whole duration of the meeting. Using this chart any attendee who consistently talks more or less during meetings can be identified. Fig 3. shows that in the first two meetings all attendees shared a fairly equal proportion of talktime but, were they all talking about the critical issues that mattered most? In order to answer that question we need the information in fig. 4; what specific topics were each attendee contributing to in the meeting?

Fig 4. shows that at the beginning of the program attendees were contributing as much to their updates as they were to the discussion of key items. Which was not the team’s goal (see column six in fig. 2). The opportunity was to make all topics other than the discussion more efficient in order to allocate more time, energy and the expertise of attendees to the discussion. Fig 4. also identifies which attendees may need extra help to contribute more to the team discussion.

Figure 4.

LWT showed TCIG exactly where the greatest areas for improvement were and then gave the team immediate feedback so that they could continue to improve meeting efficiency and effectiveness. The LWT data shows evidence of a significant improvement in only five meetings.