Making every meeting count

“Another meeting I need to attend? Why?” 

This is a thought many of us often have in our careers. Indeed, meetings are filling calendars up, and according to HBR, 70% of that meeting time is wasted. The estimated cost of unproductive meetings in Europe is between 38 and 600 billion Euros annually. The three most common reasons that make meetings a waste of time are:

1. Lack of purpose: why do we need a meeting? Wouldn’t an email/memo be enough?

2. Insufficient preparation: no explicit expectations on how and what to prepare.

3. No clear decisions/ outcomes: discussions that go around in circles lead to ambiguous answers and no clear next steps.

But above all, inviting people based on hierarchy or internal politics instead of their contribution to the meeting topic leads to either too many attendees, the wrong attendees, or both. If unprepared and run ineffectively, participants tend to be passive or feel lost. As a result, no-one gets value from that meeting, as it leads to unwanted outcomes:

● Direct waste of 20-30% of employees’ time as a result of being stuck in inefficient meetings instead of being productive.

● Opportunity cost due to delayed business-relevant decisions as a consequence of bad meeting management.

● Meeting fatigue and frustration, leading to declining employee satisfaction and resulting in talent loss.

What meetings are meant for

Meetings should be one of the most impactful leadership instruments as they enable opinion-forming, alignment, and decision-making, as well as building and maintaining working relationships.

Even a seemingly small 10% increase in meeting productivity can significantly increase an organisation’s effectiveness and generate savings between 2 and 20 million EUR annually. This is why Sherpany aspires to make every meeting count.

Sherpany offers a holistic Meeting Management solution

Sherpany’s meeting management solution consists of:

● A modern meeting management education program, as 8 out of 10 leaders never received proper training on how to make meetings excellent, and

● A meeting management app that helps executives, directors, and middle managers easily apply their meeting management know-how.

Sherpany facilitates the preparation, execution and follow-up of meetings and increases meeting excellence through embedded learning nudges. Meeting leaders are in control and can demonstrate excellent leadership, while participants can access all documents in one place with explicit preparation expectations.

They can clarify questions asynchronously beforehand, allowing the meeting leader to keep the discussion during the meeting focused on decisions and outcomes. Through the use of targeted design elements, Sherpany nudges users towards improved meeting behavior with measurable results. Participants invest more time to prepare for a valuable discussion thanks to the individual meeting preparedness state. Furthermore, thanks to Sherpany’s meeting value score (MVS), meeting quality becomes measurable.

These innovations did not go unnoticed by the experts from the SEF.Growth Programme. "During the process, we received praise for our solid business and exceptional retention rate," remembers CEO Tobias Häckermann.

Tobias Häckermann, the CEO of Sherpany, highlights a major challenge: 

“Oftentimes existing processes are digitised, without being questioned. COVID pushed millions of employees into remote work and made the adoption of meeting solutions like Zoom or MS Teams skyrocket, and the outcome is devastating: meeting volume has increased by 30% while, astoundingly, 70% or more of them are considered a waste of time. Meeting Management solutions must focus on solving the underlying problem: developing the ability of meeting leaders to prepare, host and oversee productive meetings, which means letting go of old habits and leveraging science-based meeting best practices.” 

400 companies like Migros, Raiffeisen, Kambly, Frutiger, and Helvetia are on a journey with Sherpany to make their meetings count. With the SEF.Growth label, we intend to build on this success to accelerate our future growth.