Want to save money in meetings? Simply reduce their number by 50%…
There are a number of group communication technologies out there that are becoming as ubiquitous as telephone landlines. Skype is probably the more popular one but recently Google introduced ‘Hangouts’ and it really became so inexpensive to meet on-line that one would think that passenger transport companies would suffer! But business travellers’ statistics do not seem to be affected by such communication technology developments. Why? Essentially these great communication tools that help everyone to stay in touch are not being productively used in most business organizations.
Instead of Skype or Google Hangouts, big corporations invest in highly expensive unified communications technology that allows a user to seamlessly collaborate with another person on a project, even if the two users are in separate locations.
Unified communications integrates all the systems that a user might already be using to communicate (such as phone, videoconferencing or interactive board) and helps those systems work together in real time.
However, the truth is that most collaboration processes are often ill-designed and, as a result, there is a risk of de-railing the meeting especially when conducted at a distance regardless of being supported by Skype or highly expensive UC technology.
The key to effective online meetings relies in the design of the core meeting processes that are necessary for a successful meeting and a clear perception of the collaborative working system that frames it.
By mapping your company’s collaborative processes in a standardized meeting methodology the actual time spent in meetings can be substantially reduced and you would also improve bottom line results and job satisfaction. Superior results are achieved when you couple your well tested meeting templates with in-house group facilitation services that you can create in your own organization.
Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) like MeetingSphere™ can provide the necessary support for the design of effective meeting processes that increase the success rate of your on-line (as well as face to face) meetings whenever you want to accomplish something more than simply to stay in touch and concentrate on dealing with complex business issues.
There are obviously a lot of issues in meetings such as lack of explicit group norms (so called ground rules) and absence of a clear discussion focus that any professional facilitator would be introducing to improve the quality of group work in meetings. In this sense, there is no technology available today that makes meetings more effective by themselves without human intervention.
But in a certain way the adoption of a GDSS for corporate meetings provides a way to introduce sound meeting Facilitation principles in corporate meetings. For sure, a GDSS/EMS makes the role of ‘meeting host’ much more explicit, but the key advantage is to make the role of the ‘meeting participant’ a much more effective one – everybody contributes in writing for the meeting minutes!
Learn more about how to design and implement an organization-wide meeting discipline by attending our next scheduled events or contact us now.