Optimized Meetings?
You’ve probably heard it mentioned that the pandemic has accelerated the journey to digital transformation. One of the areas where this has played out in interesting ways is in the idea of the workplace. Initially, when most of us were working from home, meetings switched almost completely to online meetings on tools such as Teams and Zoom. This took some getting used to, and a steep learning curve for some. But online meetings offer have some advantages that are worth exploring. After all, an online meeting is nothing but a connected meeting. Which means that we can move quickly to the quantification phase. What is a quantified meeting? Well, that depends on what you want to measure. Presumably, a good meeting is one where everybody is heard, conversations are productive. Decisions are made. Actions are agreed and assigned. Or a combination of all of these. And all of this is done as efficiently as possible. These things are quite hard to measure in real-world meetings. Although you always know when a meeting wasn’t great, which can happen for any number of reasons: somebody hogged the conversation, attendees were underprepared, no actions were agreed, or an item not on the agenda ended up taking most of the time.
Thanks to the need to stay competitive, the providers of online meeting tools have been innovating at pace over the past months. So, you can actually get a transcript of a Teams meeting, or record the entire meeting. And it is also possible to report on the percentage of airtime taken by each participant. Applying some machine learning tools, it would also be possible to extract from the transcript whether or not any actions were agreed, who they were assigned to, and if dates were agreed. Was the agenda covered? Was the meeting constructive or disruptive? And armed with this information, could you re-design your meetings? Amazon famously eschews PowerPoint presentations in its internal meetings in favor of a memo that everybody needs to spend the first few minutes reading. But this is driven by Jeff Bezos’s vision. And while it’s worked for Amazon, this is not to say this is right for everybody, or that it can’t be improved on. If you could actually see the data from your meetings, there’s no doubt you’d see many ways to improve the time spent.
As we come out of the pandemic, we’re going to be in a hybrid world. Partly online, partly offline. Nobody quite knows the exact shape of the hybrid work, and the balance may vary with companies, jobs, individual preferences, cultures, and so on. Everybody seems to agree that the reason for going into work is not to sit at a desk, but to meet colleagues formally and informally, and get more face-to-face time. Ironically, online meetings, which are already connected and quantified, may be much more effective in many ways. Can we find ways to bring this into the real world? You could have a voice assistant in physical meetings—think of an Alexa or Siri-like device as one of your meeting participants, which is taking notes, recording the conversation, and providing exactly the same analysis as we outlined for online meetings. It would be the same as actually having a dedicated observer for each meeting tasked to evaluate meetings, raise a flag if the conversation is digressing, and report back on the quality of the meeting.
IT Is the New HR
How do you interact with your bank? Digital, undoubtedly! How do you buy books? Talk to your friends? Engage with the government—increasingly digital, right? Talk to hotels, train companies, and airlines for your holidays? Find a date? Order pizza? Catch the latest news? Listen to music? Watch your favorite TV show? The chances are that you do all of this digitally. Not only that each of these processes have been digitized, fine-tuned, turned into easy-to-use apps, and optimized over time so that they are highly friction-free experiences. You can book a return train ticket and a hotel for a night of stay for a trip to Manchester, from London, in under five minutes. This is the digital experience we’re all used to, today.
The employee experience is still catching up with this. Thanks to cloud-based enterprise applications, single sign-on, collaboration tools such as Teams, Slack, or Google, or even Facebook@Work, things are improving every day. Which begs the question, in a digital world, what defines the impression that your employees and colleagues carry about the organization? And how is this manifested? Historically, your HR organization would own this, through the entire journey of an employee—hiring, onboarding, performance management, career architectures and exits, and spanning working conditions, morale, productivity, and satisfaction. My belief is that in a digital and connected organization, it is in fact your digital experience that drives all of this. Whatever the policies defined by IT, they are manifested in the way your digital tooling delivers them to employees. Your company may have a principle of being employee-friendly. But unless your digital interface is able to deliver on this promise, it will remain unfulfilled. This is why I say that IT is the new HR in the digital world. Not because your IT organization defines your leave policy. But they often deliver the experience that defines your view of the organization.
Starting Early
A few months ago, in a conversation with my HR colleagues, we chanced upon the fact that preboarding experience for every other organization we know is an experience that can be improved. Typically, from the time you accept an offer of employment from an organization, you are a virtual employee. Over the next few weeks and months, you will be anticipating your new joining experiences, wondering about your new colleagues, and planning for being effective as soon as you join. During this time, you will receive many requests for referral information, bank details, personal details, and be asked to fill a number of forms. But invariably, you don’t know how many activities or steps are still left to go, and what’s going in in your new organization on a day-to-day basis. In order to fix this, we built an app working with a very smart start up called Blink. Blink’s app is designed to work with remote employees. Our idea was to treat new joiners as remote employees, and overlay the Blink app with features designed for new joiners. We gamified the joining process with clarity about the total number of steps, broken into levels. Prospective employees get rewarded for completing each step, can provide feedback, can post questions, seek clarifications, and connect with fellow joiners on a common platform. But the immediate benefit of this is that the HR team can see in a single dashboard the status of all new joiners, what percentage of tasks have been completed, and whether any key milestone is missing. We’ve immediately connected and quantified the preboarding process. Optimization will invariably follow as the data will tell us where the preboarding process for any organization is performing well, or badly, and where new joiners are getting a poor experience even before they’ve joined their new organization.