The last couple of posts have focused on the things we do at the start of a plan year. This is also a good time to assess the efficiency of operations. Specifically, what everyone is spending their time doing, with a particular focus on time-vampires such as internal meetings and processes that can distract from customer-facing activities. How many internal standing meetings are there, and how many calls or messages does it take to gain approvals, or how much time are people devoting to follow-ups just to ensure other team members are living up to their commitments? You may be surprised. One Customer Success team reported that over 50% of their time was consumed internally, rather than externally working with customers. A Sales team reported a similar figure, and with that much time going into internal-facing activities, there simply was not enough time for external activities like prospecting and selling and working with clients.
Step back and think about how the business really operates. Can you remove the hurdles and time-vampires that are sucking up precious resources? One place to start is to look at routine daily, weekly, monthly meetings. Often, routine meetings start out as a way for a small team to quickly communicate and get on the same page. Maybe a services department started a weekly meeting to discuss client projects and share tips and tricks. Someone from customer success heard about the meeting and asked to join, so they can be informed about customer projects. Then someone in product wanted to join so they could learn where the implementation hurdles are, and someone from training joins, and eventually a small focused meeting has become a broad weekly gathering of all sorts of team members. What often happens in these situations is that the original purpose of the meeting becomes so diluted that the members who started the meeting regroup and begin holding their own separate meeting again, while the bloated cross-team meeting continues to drone on like a zombie. Now we have two meetings every week, and if we add up the people-hours in the room, it is obvious that this has become very costly. Maybe it is productive and worth it, but at a minimum, we should ask the question.
Company calendars are packed with routine meetings. When meetings were live and in-person, it at least took some effort to be in the room, but the problem of over-attendance has become much worse with the rise of video meetings because it is so easy for anyone to join without leaving their desk. At the start of the year, challenge the team to list all of their routine recurring meetings. For each meeting, ask them to write down its purpose, who attends, and whether they see opportunity to improve it, scale it back, combine it with some other meeting, or eliminate it? You may be surprised by how many hours the team can save.
The next step is to consider a bit of training about how to make meetings more productive and efficient. Many recurring meetings have a general purpose, but fail to have a specific agenda for each meeting, or they follow a tired routine ‘go around the room’ agenda that simply wastes time. A few basic meeting hygiene rules can drastically improve the effectiveness and efficiency of recurring meetings. At a minimum, a meeting attendee should be tasked to produce notes and publish action items, but there are also excellent AI tools that do this very well. With a reliable and effective mechanism for reporting the content of a meeting, it may become less important for some of the observers to actually attend the meetings. FOMO (fear of missing out) goes away when you know you are not missing anything.
A time vampire that is frequently highlighted is the labyrinthian process for seeking approvals. Look for opportunities to create more standard answers to routine questions while also providing managerial leeway that does not require layers of discussion, escalation and review for minor deviations from standards. When lines of authority are blurry, team members become paralyzed looking for an authority to approve their actions. Adding clarity to the org chart and improving the definitions of span of control and authority will go a long way to improving efficiency. An effective tool to define the contours is a RACI chart (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed). The Responsible person is the doer who actually carries out the action or task. The Accountable person is typically their manager who is tasked with ensuring the work was done correctly. The Consulted individual is someone who has an important opinion that should be heard, and the Informed individual simply has to be kept in the loop. If we catalog tasks and view them through the lens of a RACI matrix, span of control quickly becomes clear, and the ambiguities go away.
One of the biggest time and morale drains is missed commitments. Accountability for commitments is a foundation for trust. In a fast-paced environment, lack of trust leads to over-verification and review. It causes teammates in externally facing roles like sales and support to devote time and energy internally chasing their peers for answers and status updates. Failure to meet commitments makes the whole process grind to a halt. When a team consistently fails to meet commitments and be accountable for delivering quality results, the outcome is reflected in lost deals, bad customer satisfaction, wasted time, and intra-team friction.
The start of the plan year is a perfect time for introspection and assessment of routine operations. Think of it as a time to question everything, and ask what should we stop doing, what should we do more of, what should we start doing, and what can we improve.