Help your team help themselves!
Time is one of the most valuable resources we have. Regardless of your walk of life, there certainly never seems to be enough of it. In most professional settings, our calendars are the ledgers that account for how we spend our days. It’s normally one of the first things we look at to see what the day has in store for us.
Like all things, there is always some good, some bad, and the ever-present in between. However, there are fewer things more demoralizing than starting our day and seeing every minute accounted for.
“My first meeting starts at 8AM and my last call ends at 6:30PM. I’m basically back to back all day.”
Having a fully booked calendar triggers that sinking feeling that you’ve lost control of your day. No progress will be made on all the work you need to deliver.
In fact, what’s more likely to happen is that you’ll finish the day with more stuff to do than when you started. You’re day is spent moving from meeting to meeting gathering to-do’s and action items that you’ll get started on…well who really knows when? It’s happened to me. It’s happened to you. More times that we really care to admit or think about.
Not the ideal outcome
The irony here is having everyone in meetings all the time is not really good for the company. It just seems to happen. What is good for the company is having employees energized and doing thoughtful work that creates value. Sure, often that includes communication and collaboration on a Zoom or whatnot, but having people spend 80-90% of their weeks in meetings is not how companies win.
The challenge is that in the current landscape it’s not easy for people to understand how much time is really going into meetings. If the leadership in a company wants to define standards around the percentage of time people should spend in meetings, it’s nearly impossible to measure or enforce. Historically this has been done with various time tracking solutions which are typically viewed with resentment and suspicion by employees.
Easily see who’s slammed
With a tool like Meeting Metrix you get to see where your and your employee’s time is going. You can define standards and track how folks are doing in the platform. With the insights and data Meeting Metrix surfaces, you can empower yourself and your team to take back their day. Enable people to say no to bad meetings to stay within the right thresholds of unallocated time to do meaningful and creative work. They’ll get more done. Your employees will feel better about their own progress and that their time is valued.
There is an old adage in management which is that you can’t fix a problem you don’t know about. Beyond going through people’s calendars one by one, or having anecdotal conversations during yet another meeting, how can you know of people are over-scheduled? The answer is you don’t.
Understand where the time is going in your company. Not because you don’t trust your employees. Quite the opposite. You value them. You value their time. Empower them with data to take their days back. Start using the data in Meeting Metrix to help them help themselves.