Our new “Eight Meeting Principles” helps us ensure that we are moving away from autopilot

Customer

Morten Nørremølle, Country Director Nordic / Baltic – Canon

Challenge

How do we establish a strong meeting culture across eight different locations in the Nordic and Baltic regions?

Our Starting Point

In my organization, we have 80 employees spread across eight different countries in the Nordic and Baltic regions. This presents a challenge, particularly when it comes to meetings. We needed some changes: a better meeting culture, fewer meetings, more personal effectiveness, and better working habits.

Process

To initiate the process, two of us met with Marie from timewellspent to identify our primary challenges. We discussed and ranked our challenges to put our focus where it made most sense – and we talked about the things we can affect: How we spend our time.

This was followed by a full-company motivational speak by Marie. Based on concrete studies and her years of experience, she inspiringly shared insights as to how we spend our time, focus, and energy, providing the entire organisation with a common frame of reference.

The motivational speak also included a set of relevant questions for the teams to discuss afterwards. The feedback and results from the team talks were then handed over to the managers. Parallel to this, timewellspent also conducted a large survey among all 80 employees – on the topic how everybody perceives the working and meeting habits in our company.

All insights and feedback were gathered and brought to the table at a management workshop where we processed all data and conclusively formulated 8 meeting principles. 

The process has ensured that everybody in the company has contributed and participated in the formulation and the contents of the manifesto.

Today this manifesto ‘Our Eight Meeting Principles’ helps us ensure that we are moving away from autopilot and on to a more reflective approach, carefully considering why, when, what, and who we meet with.

Small Building Blocks

The eight meeting principles are small, but significant building blocks that form part of something bigger. We aim to incorporate more facets and build upon them, but we also recognize that it takes time.

It requires repetition. It requires our focus. And it requires us to think carefully all the time. Does this issue require a meeting, or would an email be sufficient?

Personal Performance

Our personal performance was also a topic for discussion with Marie. Time is a factual matter, but it is also about perception. How do you spend your time? At what time of the day is your efficiency and brain activity at its peak? When are you most creative?

These Personal Performance sessions were conducted not only with the management team but the entire organisation to secure a shared understanding and a common frame of reference – now and moving forward. 

Today each of us reflects to a much larger extent on how we can best spend our time. If you happen to be someone who functions better in the morning, it is best to tackle tasks that require more mental focus during that time of day.

Things Worth Considering 

1. I see a general increase in the number of meetings. Before COVID, there were many physical meetings. During COVID, we found that Teams meetings worked well. We now experience that the physical meetings have returned coupled with the Teams meetings. Therefore, these meeting principles are valuable to us in our aim to reduce the number of meetings. 

2. We need to switch between two types of work time:

2. 2. • Time with our colleagues to discuss matters, do brainstorming work and interact (meeting)
      • Time for immersion and focus (NO meeting)

This is the best mix to create innovation, developments, and good results.

Do you also want to free up time? Increase personal performance? Enable your organization with proven methods to a balanced workload?

 Reach out to Marie Litrup at +45 51 21 15 14 or marie@timewellspent.dk