Can more creative ways of meeting save our focus?
Back in the 1960s, company leaders spent 10 hours a week in meetings. Today, it’s much higher—more than two hundred percent higher. Time spent in meetings is still rising. Every year since 2000, total meeting time has increased by about 10% for everyone regardless of role. Despite a trend in shorter meetings that started from the pandemic (great!), the total number of meetings continues to rise (not so great). Meetings where people synchronously meet face-to-face—whether in real life, on a video conference, or over the phone—are now the go-to standard for most forms of communication and collaboration. Need to share information with your team? Brainstorm new marketing campaign ideas? Deliver training? Book a meeting. It’s a one-size-fits-all tool that has turned our calendars into Tetris screens. Our workdays have become so dominated by these syncs and check-ins that it can be a challenge to see another way. Instead of pointing fingers at inexperienced managers, an increase in remote and cross-functional work, or even FOMO as the cause of our meeting fatigue, what if we looked for more options in the way we choose to meet, collaborate, and communicate? This isn’t all to say that face-to-face communication doesn’t have a place in modern work culture. There’s very little that can replace real-time conversations when it comes to getting to know a new colleague or discussing a sensitive matter, for instance. Yet anyone who has faced eight solid hours of endless synchronous meetings knows this isn’t sustainable for every situation. Instead, exploring alternative meeting formats can give everyone involved more choice and flexibility. By empowering people to communicate in mutually appropriate ways, we can reduce meeting times without compromising much communication or collaboration. We can reclaim time, refocus our attention, and pour renewed efforts into more focused work. Nearly 70% of managers say meetings keep employees from working and completing all their tasks. One size does not fit all Traditional meetings follow the same general structure—a format of real-time communication provided synchronously between present parties. It’s a default model that aims to serve everyone, but appealing to everyone can often mean appealing to no one. In his book The End of Average, Todd Rose reported on how the United States Air Force modernized their old-fashioned cockpits in the late 1940s. Taking measurements from over 4,000 pilots, they designed a new layout around the median fit. By designing every element for the average pilot, they designed for everyone… or so they thought. When test pilots took to the skies, they kept crashing. Something was wrong. Eventually, one scientist began comparing individual pilots to the average model. There, he discovered the issue: not a single pilot fit the average. Their one-size-fits-all cockpit just didn’t work. The same result can be seen decades later, in an albeit, completely different environment. Today, nearly 70% of managers say meetings keep employees from working and completing all their tasks. Three-quarters of employees say they tune out of meetings and do other work. Around 90% say they regularly daydream in meetings. The average model just isn’t working. Pilots needed customizable cockpits to be effective. To do our best work, we too need more flexibility in the way we meet. As the saying goes, if the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail. Modern meetings have become the Maslow’s hammer of the workplace, but introducing a few new tools can bring a more agile, renewed perspective on collaboration. Flexible formats unleash creativity Marc Bromhall used to rely on a mix of in-person and Zoom meetings to run his marketing company, Marbro Media. Every week, he’d spend eight or nine hours in recurring meetings, hashing out ideas and strategies with his team. But he knew that wasn’t the best use of anyone’s time. “The core issue of each meeting comprised 20% of it,” he explains. “The other 80% consisted of fluff, mindless chatter, and small talk.” He began designing an alternative meeting format that cultivated creativity and collaboration without wasting time. In the end, Marc landed on what he calls a voice-jam, “a combination of voice notes and a jam board.” Aside from one synchronous face-to-face meeting, voice-jams power all Marbro Media’s meetings. Take their weekly marketing meeting. Before, it was rambling and disjointed. Now, every attendee has their own slide on a jamboard. They embed content and post voice notes to share ideas. The format keeps discussions laser-focused while retaining many of the good parts of face-to-face communication, such as intonation and tone. Marc says the flexible format freed him from endless hours of meandering meetings: “There's no small talk and talking for the sake of talking. Employees simply record what they have to say and send it on.” All around the world, people are replacing one-size-fits-all meetings with innovative alternatives. Async video creates organizational memory Ronald Osborne’s story is similar. As a small business consultant, he often found himself drawn into lengthy face-to-face meetings and calls. Not only did they take up a lot of time, but he also felt like meeting content was getting lost or forgotten in notes and minutes. He began experimenting with asynchronous video, recording short presentations, and sharing them with project team members. He says it’s working well. For one thing, it’s eliminated the challenge of time zones. Clients and colleagues access recordings on their schedule—not his. However, the biggest difference lies in response time. In a face-to-face meeting, there’s an expectation to reply immediately. Should we expand into Asia-Pacific? Yes. What applicant should we hire? Steve. Do you like product-led or sales-led growth? Product. Meetings rarely provide time to pause, mull, and think—all of which are essential components of effective decision-making. Online tools for asynchronous video, like Dropbox Capture, allow people to digest information before responding. With the ability to record, re-record, and edit videos, responses can be more thoughtful and concise. Beyond voice and video Many business communication strategies rely on frequency. Daily standups, for example, allow people to share their achievements, plans, and roadblocks every day. The theory goes that teams can identify problems as early as possible and work together to solve them. The same’s true for project updates, line management one-to-ones, and other recurring meetings. But that safety net comes at a cost. Daily or weekly interruptions shatter schedules, turning unbroken stints of concentration into fragmented bursts of work. To safeguard his colleagues’ schedules, Chris Johnson, marketing coordinator at a technical talent marketplace, implemented a “no daily meetings” rule. Instead, he redeveloped recurring meetings into slimmed-down templatized rituals. His team’s daily standup, once a frustrating interruption, is now a dedicated Slack channel. Every day, his colleagues answer the three core questions: What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? What’s blocking your progress? “It allows everyone in the company to have visibility into what other teams are working on without overloading folks with information,” Chris explains. In other words, the same impact with less disruption. More tools, better communication Marc, Ronald, and Chris are not the only people exploring communication optionality. All around the world, people are replacing one-size-fits-all meetings with innovative alternatives. Entrepreneur Kyle Clements stopped delivering synchronous training sessions. Instead, he records asynchronous videos and shares them online. “Most people simply don’t retain something the first time they hear it,” he says. “Async videos allow employees to watch and rewatch a tutorial or important walkthrough as many times as they need. Instead of running feedback sessions, financial services educator Brian DeChesare sends out Google Forms. “While we can’t eliminate every meeting, we use these forms to reduce the unnecessary ones and foster more effective meetings by planning with important data already in hand,” he explains. Growth executive Trevor Ford employs transparent project management tools to nix regular status updates. Marketing leader Sarah Schultz replaced synchronous information-sharing sessions with detailed written briefs. And Chris Johnson didn’t just get rid of standups. He replaced one-way information-sharing meetings with asynchronous video, text, and documents. This isn’t to say synchronous face-to-face meetings don’t have their place. It’s difficult to build personal relationships over a jamboard. It’s tough to open up about workplace challenges via text. But what innovators have shown is that optionality—choice over how you communicate—is the future. By selecting the best meeting format, people can focus instead on work that really matters.Are software products sustainable?
Published November 3, 2022 in Business by Linn Kjaerland How do software products affect sustainability? And what is actually better for the climate – reading a printed book or streaming a movie? Read on to find out. This article is written by Sara Gustafsson, previously a Management Trainee, now Analytics & Automation Initiatives Manager at Visma Enterprise. At Visma we work with sustainability in many areas and from multiple perspectives. Our software solutions greatly impact sustainability – through the technology powering them, their design, and their usage. This summer, as a management trainee, I worked on a project to improve our product sustainability. The project’s objectives were to get an overview of sustainability in the software domain and to explore ways to communicate best practices of working with sustainability to product teams across Visma. In this article, you’ll learn what sustainability in the software industry is about and get some key findings from the project. The impact of software Digitalisation and software are considered key to sustainability and achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Software can help us optimise resource usage, substitute resources and understand our world and impact through data. It can contribute to increased inclusion, better access to healthcare services and more efficient education, to mention a few of many examples. At the same time, software contributes to climate change, and it can potentially have negative effects on social sustainability both throughout the supply chain and through its usage. Studies estimate that the ICT sector generates around 1.8–2.8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This is similar to the aviation industry, which represented 1.9% of global emissions in 2016. The electricity consumption of data centres is a topic gaining more and more attention. Some studies predict that the ICT sector will consume from 8 to 21% of the electricity in the world by 2030, where a significant part would be consumed by data centres. The exact numbers are disputed though; some studies predict that increased energy efficiency might dampen these emission increases in spite of the increased demand for digital services and data centres. The software industry’s responsibility Independent of the exact figures, it’s clear that the software industry needs to use resources responsibly and as efficiently as possible – not least since other sectors like transportation and heating need to be electrified to reduce global carbon emissions, and thus further increase global electricity demand. Software can contribute to social sustainability. However, if not developed carefully, digital services can also be misused or unintentionally harm people and communities. Accessibility, privacy, and human rights in the supply chains of IT equipment are some of the risk areas. Our software impacts sustainability both directly, through the technology and design of our products, and indirectly, through the usage of our products. Sustainable software (direct): Refers to the direct impact of the technology, for example how the software is designed and developed. Software for Sustainability (indirect): Refers to the indirect impact of the technology, in particular the usage of the software and how this helps achieve sustainability goals. What is Sustainable Software? Sustainable software can be divided into technological, individual, social, environmental and economic sustainability. Technological sustainability is about how the system can adapt to and persist in changing surroundings. It relates to the scalability of the service, knowledge transfer in organisations, and reducing technical debt among other things. Individual sustainability is about the well-being of the people working with the software, the work environment and how we interact with each other. Social sustainability relates to the software’s impact on democracy, human rights, privacy and security. Environmental sustainability includes the impact of the software on the planet through its entire lifecycle. The objective here is to build services that are carbon, energy and hardware efficient. Finally, the economic sustainability of software relates to aspects like the value added, profitability and meeting contract requirements. In the project, we identified four priority areas to facilitate sustainable software development. Awareness about the sustainability impact of software Incentives to motivate investments in sustainability Data to understand the current impact and validate gains of improvements Easy-to-use tools and best practices to follow. To target the first area, awareness, and the last one, tools and best practices, we developed and pilot-tested a sustainability assessment during the project. Sustainability Assessment – a great way to identify improvements The sustainability assessment was tested with four product teams at Visma and focused mainly on identifying the direct impact of our products on environmental sustainability and ways to reduce it. Regarding the social perspective, we could refer the teams to already existing Visma material such as security, privacy, and accessibility information, and complement this with additional inclusion topics in the assessment. Feedback from the pilot teams indicated that the assessment was a good way to get an overview of all the different impact areas of their software. It also provided the teams with a few specific potential improvement areas to look further into. Some of the topics discussed with the teams were (1) public cloud and geographical location, (2) culture of resource efficiency, and (3) carbon-aware software. Public Cloud and Geographical Location There are many benefits of cloud technology. One way to improve the energy and hardware efficiency of software products is to use the public cloud to host the services. Large public cloud providers invest heavily in increasing the energy efficiency of their facilities and IT equipment. Resources can be shared among multiple users, and also scaled dynamically to match actual demand. This results in a lower environmental impact compared to traditional enterprise data centres or on-prem solutions. Another important aspect is to consider where the service is hosted geographically. First, it’s best to choose regions close to our users to minimise the distance data has to travel for both latency and energy reasons. Second, the energy mix powering the data centres in different regions varies. This means that the carbon emissions generated by the consumed electricity can vary a lot between different data centres. Resource Efficiency Writing efficient code and using the best-suited technology for each task are important for several reasons. It improves performance and the user experience, reduces cost, and also increases energy and hardware efficiency. With usage-based pricing models, the incentives to use resources more efficiently increase. But also when there is a fixed price, or when the cost is very low, we should still always consider the environmental cost and use resources as efficiently as possible. By proactively working with code efficiency, optimising our infrastructure, and building the right things to create the most value for our users, we build more sustainable software products. By proactively working with code efficiency, optimising our infrastructure, and building the right things to create the most value for our users, we build more sustainable software products. Carbon Aware Software A third topic discussed with the pilot teams was the opportunity to time-shift workloads so that they run at times when there is more renewable energy available. This concept is referred to as carbon-aware software. It is applicable for heavy batch jobs which run in the background or are less time sensitive. Traditionally these jobs run when requested or outside of office hours. But what if it’s sunny and windy during the day? Maybe we should reconsider our scheduling and do these jobs during the day instead. Environmentally sustainable software is not only about energy efficiency and renewable energy. In some cases, the environmental impact of the production of IT equipment can be bigger than the impact of using the equipment. Especially in the Nordic countries where we have low-carbon energy, the manufacturing of equipment may represent a larger share of the total impact. As such, the assessment also included the important aspect of hardware consumption and how we ensure that we, our providers, and our users are able to use IT equipment for as long as possible. Our work continues… Ultimately, we want to ensure that we have a positive net impact and strive to maximise this. That is, developing software that creates value and contributes to sustainability, while also being conscious about our resource consumption and minimising the negative impact. So, what has the best net impact if we compare streaming a movie and reading a printed book? Well, if I watch a two-hour-long movie on my TV here in Sweden this would generate about 5 grams of CO 2 equivalent. Reading a book for 2 hours would generate approximately 120 grams (assuming it takes me ~12 hours to read the entire book). If we only compare the carbon emissions, watching a movie appears to be the better option. However, to determine the net impact, we need to investigate other potential negative impacts and then determine the total added value. Perhaps the book is borrowed from a library and can be read by 30 people during its lifetime? Then my two hours of reading would represent only 4 grams of carbon emissions, potentially making it a better option than the movie. With this trainee project and the assessment developed during it, we boost our efforts related to the environmental sustainability of our software. However, as described earlier, sustainability in software is a broad topic that includes different perspectives and levels of impact. We work to create more sustainable software in order to help our users become more sustainable.
