A ubiquitous goal among every business is to reduce unnecessary costs to maximize profit margins, like a balance scale of sorts. Successfully making progress regarding cost reduction, can lead to greater opportunities and greater potential. Having the ability to reinvest more money back into the business to provide a better workplace for your employees, and better goods and services for your customers, is quintessential to a company’s’ growth. With 2020 being a challenging year for many to say the least, it is almost fully underway and 2021 is finally around the corner. The New Year is a time for many individuals and companies to reflect on the past year to plan for success in the following year.
Reflecting on how your company conducts meetings, I want you to ask yourself a few questions:
- Have your meetings added enough value to your business in the past? (If the answer is no, what could be done better?)
- Were there any technical challenges? How much productivity was lost as a result?
- How much time are you spending on organizing, or preparing meetings?
- With the new COVID-19 era, what safety precautions have you determined to be a best fit for your business operations to proceed with less concerns around health and safety?
There are many issues with the way most meetings are run. Opening up the discussion to determine what problems your business is facing, becomes the first step towards a solution.
Studies at Harvard University have shown that the most successful meetings consist of smaller groups; typically between 5 to 8 people. Meeting organizers are sometimes unsure on who should be on the invite list. However, as with emails, this typically ends up with everyone being invited as a precautionary measure, leading to some inadvertent consequences. The problem, is that larger meetings tend to suffer from less collaboration and engagement, since larger groups are consequentially less “personal” than meetings consisting of smaller groups. A downward spiral can ensue, causing your attendees to take meetings less seriously, influencing them to be less prepared, and meetings can habitually drag on. Aside from re-educating the organizers to figure out who the key stakeholders are that should be in a given meeting, another strategy would be to make it easier for the organizer to create and finalize a scheduled meeting; allowing them to focus on forming a productive meeting. There are many technological solutions that can solve this problem, with the added benefits of simplicity, uniformity, standardization, as well as increased efficiency and health safety. Control system applications can be configured for room scheduling, availability, and even make ad-hoc meetings easier to organize more immediately.
Technical challenges can also be solved by integrating a well-planned control system solution; making difficult and/or menial/repetitive tasks a breeze! Psychologically, the brain fundamentally operates significantly better with a positive state of mind and less distractions. Don’t let technical difficulties alter the capacity of which your employees are conducting business operations.
Meetings are usually a critical part of any key business decision making process. If a meeting takes 10 or 15 minutes to set up, a substantial amount of time and productivity is being wasted. If you could buy that time back, it becomes a no-brainer when considering the aggregated measurement of productivity lost over the span of even just a single calendar year. Control system automation can be fine tuned for standard meeting rooms to ensure that the meeting is ready to go by the time the first participant shows up. Resources to train staff on how to use meeting rooms can also become less necessary, especially when the user experience can be standardized across an entire building. Simplicity adds great value in terms of efficiency, and your employees won’t lose their train of thought for the meeting agenda, due to meeting preparation.
As COVID-19 took the world by storm, and opened many eyes, there became many new requirements to consider. One such consideration, is how to ensure that the digital workplace imposes less of a health risk to key stakeholders within a business? The workplace quickly transformed into variations, ranging from entirely remote operations, to hybrid meeting spaces, and even “touchless” solutions to reduce human to human germ transmission. Once infrastructure is in place, and security implications have been addressed, the cost savings of having the ability to collaborate remotely simply cannot be ignored. Technology, being the cornerstone of nearly every possible solution to these problems, has since been adopted by many organizations across the globe. Revisiting efficiency in the context of number of meeting participants, and in addition to controlling capacity, solutions which leverage machine learning can be deployed. A number of camera manufacturers now provide capabilities for people counting, which can be used to collect data for reasons regarding health and safety, compliance, and a myriad of other reasons. In a world where data is king, you’ll want to be sure that the data is there when you want to review it in the future. Without data, making smart decisions that can impact business operations becomes nearly impossible.
If your business is struggling to find the right solution that fits your operating requirements and key needs, don’t hesitate to reach out for assistance! We believe that it isn’t worth the headache and cost implications of not making improvements in these areas, or attempting to solve it by trial and error. Don’t hesitate to reach out to one of our experienced team members if you’d like to learn about how we can help you improve your business’ collaboration workflow. Our goal is to help you attain peace of mind while having the ability to focus on other areas of your business that require more urgent attention.
