Phase 1 – Awareness – Virtual Toolchest

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Recently you will have installed your Outlook add-in, gathered stats on your meetings, and hopefully seen the results in your Inspirometer account. So what now?

You may be surprised to hear that the main goal is not to reduce the time you spend on meetings. The goal of Inspirometer is to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your meetings – to make them a better place for teamwork, inspiration and encouragement. And while this will inevitably enable you to achieve more in less time, and thereby reduce the time you need in meetings – this reduction is to arise out of increased quality, not vice versa.

That said, the new visibility you have over your meeting data may indeed highlight some adjustments you wish to make, but we need to stress that these must not be to the detriment of the quality of those meetings, and so it needs to be done carefully and in dialogue with others.

There are three phases of achieving the benefits from the visibility you now have over your meetings, each containing four steps, and you are at the start of the first, so we recommend caution at this stage. There is plenty of time to get used to your new data and to develop a better understanding of what it is telling you.

The steps for Phase 1 are:

Step 1 - Observe: Review the data and ensure its accuracy

Objective: Get familiar with your data, and refine it until you are confident that it accurately reflects your meeting time

The various charts and donuts will present you with an analysis of the composition of your meetings:

The balance between internal and external meetings – how much time are we spending with our customers?
The proportion of your meetings that are held virtually
The degree to which your meetings are recurring meetings
To what extent your meetings have objectives and agenda defined
How much of your time is taken up in travel
And, overall, what proportion of your time is taken up in hosting or attending meetings

Charts tend to use two colours – blue for meetings you are hosting (where you have sent out the meeting invitation) and green for those meetings you have attended (which someone else has organised). Many of the charts are of the donut type, and show the proportion of meetings that fall into different groups (based on size, length, type, etc.). Hovering over (on a PC) or tapping (on a tablet/phone) segments in these charts will provide more information on each piece of data, and so you can fairly quickly get to grips with what your meeting stats are showing you. There are also (i) Information symbols liberally distributed on the page so that you can see what some of the other numbers mean.

The histogram in the top left corner shows you (for the days where there is data) the proportion of time you spent hosting, attending and traveling to meetings.

Hopefully you will have already spent a bit of time fixing any obvious nonsenses in your data. If you have not, please follow these instructions in order to do a basic clean up for the previous 3 months in your calendar. You should also look at the physical meetings you attended and consider whether any of these involved travel. If they did, include an appointment for the time of that Travel (to and from) and give it a subject beginning with the text Travel:

Once your historic data is accurate, please review your scheduled appointments and meetings going forward. The following disciplines will help increase the value we collectively get out of the data:

Look at the physical meetings you have scheduled and, if any of these involve travel, include appointments for the times of that travel and give them a subject beginning with the text Travel:
Ensure that any meeting location on-site uses the label for the meeting room from the ‘Rooms’ button in the meeting organiser – this will help improve these facilities for future use
Ensure that any virtual meetings clearly include the name of the virtual meeting tool being used in the location field
Only invite people who are likely to attend the meeting, and who will contribute and/or benefit in regard to its value-add

Once you have done this for the items already scheduled into your calendar, you will find it very easy, almost effortless, to maintain these disciplines for whenever you add new things into your calendar.

Step 2 - Reconsider: Identify alternatives to meetings and travel

Objective: Where there are obvious adjustments to be made that you are confident will not diminish quality – make them

Once you are fully familiar with, and confident in, your data, you may find that there are some obvious changes you would like to make. The following questions may highlight opportunities to think about whether there is any benefit in doing a few things differently. For instance:

What would be the implications of spending a bit less meeting time internally and a bit more time involving customers in meetings?
Are the routine meetings always efficient, or would it make sense to adjust the meeting time to what is required at that point in time?
Could more physical meetings be made virtual, and how would this reduce the travel component?
Could the purpose of some (parts of) meetings be fulfilled by better use of SSN as a collaborative tool?
Do all the meetings you attend use your time efficiently, or would it make better use of your time to attend only partially or in a different way?
Might the same be true for other attendees at some of the meetings you host?
How does the overall time spend compare with what you would ideally like it to be, and might some of the adjustments described above achieve this for you?

But please be careful. You don’t have to make these changes, and some changes could have an adverse effect on your colleagues or how effectively the business works. Please remember that our goal is to make meetings more effective, and that any reduction in meeting time will arise out of this effectiveness. Therefore, please do not make any changes which could risk the value that you, or others, get out of the meeting.

From stage 2 onwards, we will be able to see the impact of our changes on the quality of the meeting in the feedback collected, but at this first stage we do not have this means of automatically evaluating our ideas. We would therefore encourage you to check out your proposed changes with the others involved in the meeting before putting them into practice. And to institute Step 4 as a means of checking that any changes remain productive for you and your people.

Step 3 - Clarify: Communicate a clear purpose and approach

Objective: Make sure that the purpose and approach of the meetings you run (and attend) are clear and agreed – fix the basics

Question – how long does it take a team to … do anything? Answer – we haven’t a clue!

Unless you know what it is the team is trying to do, how can you estimate how long it will take? And yet we regularly set and accept time in our calendars for meetings where no one has actually defined the objective or laid out the steps to achieve it. This can affect meeting efficiency in two ways:

The meeting is rushed and not fully effective, or it drags out to fill the time, and
Meeting time is lost as people seek to reconcile differing perspectives on its purpose.

Defining a clear (ideally ‘SMART’) objective for your meeting is basic good practice, as is defining the proposed agenda to deliver that objective. Furthermore, these two simple mechanisms are the most important factor in meeting effectiveness, and the key enabler to meeting improvement. But despite that, lack of objectives and agenda for meetings is fairly commonplace.

Inspirometer tracks the adoption of objectives and agenda in meetings for two reasons: 1) in recognition of its primary importance, and 2) to provide a meaningful basis for measurement of meeting effectiveness.

Being an automated tool, Inspirometer requires Objectives and Agenda to be in a particular format to be able to recognise and utilise the information – but these requirements are fairly simple and not onerous.

The general principles are:

Inspirometer looks for the text strings Objective: and Agenda: in the body of the invite – the colons immediately follow the word (no space)
The objective needs to follow the string Objective: immediately on the same line. It captures all the text until it encounters an ‘enter’ or ‘new line’ character
Agenda: needs to be on a line on its own, followed by a list of the agenda items below it. Each item must be preceded by # and a number and a space afterward

These principles are illustrated in the example below:

Objective: This is where you type the purpose your meeting – after it encounters the text string ‘Objective:’ Inspirometer captures everything up to the end of the line.

Agenda:

#1 Inspirometer looks for numbered items following the text ‘Agenda:’

#2 Each agenda item must be on a separate numbered line

#3 Immediately preceded by the # symbol as the first character on that line

#4 The number must be followed by a space or tab, and then the title of the item

#4.1 Decimals are allowed in the numbering

Anything that does not follow this format is ignored

If your meeting invites do not currently communicate the objective and agenda for the meeting, we would entreat you to remedy this forthwith. It may take a little time to clarify exactly what these are, but time invested in generating and communicating such clarity will pay real dividends in arriving at a successful outcome more quickly.

Step 4 - Review: Reflect on your success at the end of each meeting

Objective: Take time at the end of each meeting to discuss whether improvements are working, and what more is needed

Inspirometer is not intended as an alternative to dialogue. It is intended as a stimulus to encourage it. The faces are not an end in themselves, they are a basis for beginning a conversation which helps everyone to get more out of the next meeting. So why have them? Why not simply have the conversation?

The reality is, that without Inspirometer feedback, 90% of the conversations fail to take place. People forget to ask for feedback, others may feel too exposed to give it, everybody is busy and rushing, and unless there is a clear problem it tends to be bland. Conversely, clicking a face is anonymous and happens quickly. And where there is real data, the overall context is better understood, and the quality of dialogue is improved – people take more effort over their answers. Furthermore, it is easier to track the small changes and improvements that would be unlikely to get a mention.

Inspirometer increases and improves dialogue, but you don’t need to wait for Inspirometer feedback to get started with some level of dialogue – particularly if you are making changes as a result of Step 2. We would recommend that you schedule 5 minutes at the end of each meeting to capture a simple review of the meeting using the WWW/AFI (What went well / Areas for improvement) tool. This is a simple way of reviewing a meeting with a group, recognising the good things people did, and learning from the things that didn’t work so well. It is simply a flip-chart with two columns, the first headed WWW (What went well), and the second headed AFI (Areas for improvement). The steps are as follows:

At the end of the meeting, remind people of the objective of the meeting, and then simply draw a line down through the centre of a clean flipchart sheet and write WWW as a heading on one side, and AFI as a heading on the other. Then ask the group “So what do we feel we did well in this meeting?”, and write the responses as a list down the left hand side.
If people raise criticisms before the WWWs are finished, ask them to focus for the moment on the positives, and that there will be time in a minute or two to shift our minds to a negative perspective. Try to move the suggestions around the room so that one or two individuals do not dominate the list.
Once the WWWs reach the bottom of the page, ask people to reflect back on what might have been improved in the meeting, and list these on the right hand side.
Typically you will end up with 5 to 10 things on each side. If there are actions out of the list, make sure that there are given an owner (even if it is you) and bring the list back to the start of the next meeting to remind the group on what we did well last time, and what we are going to do differently this time.
A couple of tips to overcome problems you might encounter over time:

- If it is clear that only a few people are participating and the rest are simply ‘letting them do it’, ask everybody individually to write down two things that went well and two things they would like to see improved – then wait until everyone has written something before you ask them for items for your list. You will find the result is much more balanced and free-flowing.
- If you feel that the list contains a number of things that most people don’t agree with, offer people two green dots each to stick beside the items they personally feel are the most important to take forward, and one red dot if there is anything they feel should not be up there.

Review the list you get at the end with any changes you have initiated (Step 2 – Reconsider) to make sure that these changes are not adversely affecting the quality of your meetings.

Please click on the headings above to gain a better understanding of your options within each.

These steps are not necessarily sequential – they just make a bit more sense when they are explained in this order. In practice, there may be a considerable amount of overlap between the steps, and even re-cycling round them to get a better result. So, please start with 1, and then feel free to jump to any of the others. However, we would recommend that you get step 4 in place fairly quickly so that you can ensure that any changes made through 2 and 3 are not damaging the quality of what was going on before.

Please let us know how you get on. Use the time control to take a snapshot of your stats page before and after Stage 1, and send us some screen captures of the difference – however small.

Moving onto Phase 2 – insight.