Imagine you're about to join a meeting on Zoom. Once it starts, three things are missing: the agenda, clear presentation slides, and key team members for the project. It's digital chaos.
Once hailed as a key piece to collaboration, today's meetings have almost become synonymous with inefficiency. Amid the long-winded sessions, people desperately want to make meetings effective again.
In 2017, only 17% of senior executives found their meetings productive. We're in critical need for change. This is where the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS) Model steps in to fill the gap, providing a structured approach to the way organizations conduct meetings and, in turn, produce effective results. Let’s take a look at the several formats that businesses can follow from the EOS Model.
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The Impact of Meeting Formats on Creativity
Video conferencing is now a crucial part of day-to-day operations across various workplaces. However, few leaders are equipped with the tools to keep meetings productive and meaningful. Instead, technology has only caused a decrease in value-creation and collaboration.
Many companies have explored alternative meeting formats like walking meetings and virtual reality sessions to break the monotony. Interactive technologies such as VR headsets, virtual whiteboards, and digital drawings allow users to continue nurturing relationships despite geographical boundaries with their teams and block real-world distractions.
But we don't need to be in an immersive digital environment to have an engaging discussion. EOS encourages leaders to accomplish goals while involving the entire team through their Delegate and Elevate™ Principle. This idea stresses that everyone has an important role to play in the growth of a business, and that for leaders to lead their organization properly, they should not work above their capacity.
One example is when team members are empowered to take turns facilitating weekly calls or tasked with writing down the meeting minutes. Delegating takes a lot of weight off a leader's to-do list and empowers team members to be more proactive in the future. Not only does this increase trust within your team, but it also impacts the overall efficiency of the business.
Leverage Technology for Meeting Efficiency
Tech tools play a big role in enhancing productivity, from high-speed comms to cloud-based collaboration. Businesses leveraging the right technology can build an efficient working environment.
Analytical tools, such as Power BI, Tableau, and Microsoft Excel, have become indispensable, because these tools use artificial intelligence and machine learning to give us meaningful information. This, in turn, allows managers to make more effective business decisions.
High-speed telecommunications, propelled by technology advancements like 5G, have also revolutionized remote work. Collaborative software, including ProProfs, Trello, and Basecamp, leverage enhanced online collaboration features, making remote work more productive. Videoconferencing solutions like Microsoft Teams and Zoom allow for calls among geographically dispersed teams.
EOS integrates technology better into meetings with the Meeting Pulse™ tool, offering a structured approach to annual, quarterly, and weekly meetings. With the help of this tool, meetings are a vehicle for productive discussions rather than a source of inefficiency. This also ensures that large, long-term objectives are achievable.
Taking from the term “pulse,” different meetings are set up throughout the year to ensure everyone is keeping pace with company goals. An Annual Planning sets the company's vision for the year, which will be further broken down during the Quarterly Meeting. Every quarter, team members do actionable tasks that are relevant to the company's growth. Weekly Meetings then allow employees to raise issues, realign with the overarching goal, review metrics, and ensure to-do list items are checked off.
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Encourage Inclusive Meetings and Diverse Perspectives
In Deloitte's 2017 research, many leaders agree that having a more diverse team is beneficial to their business. Innovation comes from a company that has diverse voices, backgrounds, and perspectives. When every voice is relevant and involved in the company's shared goal, the company can then focus on an objective that benefits the whole rather than the few.
At the same time, it can be tough for teams to work towards a solution when there are no tools to help them. So, how can we ensure the inclusion of these diverse voices? By creating a safe and respectful environment that empowers these voices to speak up. The Issues Solving Track™ helps leaders work through these obstacles and reach an equitable solution.
The Issues Solving Track™ consists of the following steps:
- Identify:
Identify what the real issue is. The stated problem is rarely the real problem, as the actual issue is typically found a few layers down. Create an open and honest environment where team members can bring these forward. - Discuss:
The discussion step gives everyone the chance to say everything they want to say about the issue. People can share their unique perspectives and find the root cause of the problem. - Solve:
The solution is usually a concrete action item that is assigned to someone to complete. When the items are completed, the issue is considered solved.
It's important to remember that solving issues takes time, but by fostering an environment that is eager to suggest diverse solutions and work toward the betterment of the company, you are building a business that is destined for growth and opportunity.
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Use Agile Methodologies for Meetings
Agile methodologies, traditionally associated with software development, are making waves in meeting management. Agile is an iterative project management approach, ensuring adaptability and speed. With the need to make continuous improvements to our products, agile is crucial for timely and accurate product delivery. Its two most common approaches are scrum and kanban. Kanban visualizes to-dos and allows everyone to see the state of every task. Scrum, on the other hand, focuses on fixed-interval sprints to complete a large project in smaller chunks.
EOS also has a tool that creates a standard structure for weekly productive meetings. The Level 10 Meeting™ (L10) lays out a template for team meetings to focus on the most important things each week without the nonsense. Here is the typical agenda of a L10 meeting:
- Good News
- KPIs
- Quarterly Goals
- Employee Headlines
- Review of last week's to-dos
- Identify, discuss, and solve (IDS) issues
- Conclude
Level 10 meetings provide a solid framework to discuss the most important highlights for the week. Team members focus on hard objectives and metrics. There is little space for subjective opinions, unless it's to suggest solutions. This way, the team can minimize tangents to cover only what matters.
Individuals are also already assigned as the facilitator and the scribe for every meeting. This answers the question: “Who's leading this meeting?” Removing this ambiguity saves precious minutes discussing and agreeing to roles in each meeting.
Foster Mindfulness and Well-Being in Meetings
Mindfulness practices are increasingly recognized as contributors to well-being in the workplace. Clarity Breaks™ can break the monotony of your day-to-day life and introduce self-care into your work routine. The frequency—whether daily, weekly, or monthly—is at the discretion of the individual.
The key is consistency. Choosing a conducive environment, whether a local coffee shop or a quiet space at home, enhances the effectiveness of clarity breaks.
During a clarity break, individuals are encouraged to disconnect from devices and focus on their thoughts. This time allows ideas to surface, priorities to become clear, and stress to dissipate. The simplicity of mindfulness often leads to profound insights.
Gamify Elements for Engagement
Gamification uses a reward system to drive productivity and concrete output. This does not only mean playing weekly trivia games. This can also look like celebrating employee wins or using progress bars to see how much your team has achieved during the quarter. Gamifying these objectives makes these tasks less overwhelming and encourages creativity.
One of the EOS tools that allows businesses to excel at annual business planning is the concept of Rocks—clear priorities that teams set every 90 days. This creates a 90-Day World™ for organizations where leaders can keep their organization focused on three to four priorities and stay on track for the year.
Data-Driven Decision-Making in Meetings
The significance of a data-driven approach during meetings cannot be overstated. Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS) Model emphasizes the importance of leveraging data to benchmark existing processes, instill confidence in decision-making, and continuously monitor (and improve upon) these decisions. In a landscape where every decision matters, a data-driven approach is imperative.
By using the tools that we discussed here, your organization can identify and prioritize key issues and brainstorm the appropriate solutions. It all depends on where you want to start—and we say it all starts with more effective communication in your meetings.
Find out how you can integrate these EOS tools to your management strategies. Get in touch with us today!
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