Communication and Collaboration To Improve The Meeting "Experience"

I typically join 2 - 5 conference calls per day. Most are completely within my firm. Many are across firms and development partners worldwide. The overall meeting experience is typically frustrating, especially in the start-up. I just went through one this morning which triggered this blog though it's been on my mind for a while. Deployment of and enhancements to Unified Communications and Collaboration applications can help meeting start-up and efficiency. Running effective meetings is a broader subject that I'm not targeting here.

First, let's put this into a financial example. For a mid-large business having 50 meetings per day, with 10 attendees, making an average of 150K annually ($75 /hr), and a net of 15 minutes productivity lost in each meeting, they'd have over $2M of lost productivity cost annually. For many enterprises this may be a conservative estimate. Over and above the "cost", you're often left with a generally poor meeting experience for the attendees.

What's behind this? In almost every conference call I observe the following productivity loss:

1. Lateness. Participants are usually never all on and ready to start. I certainly don't expect 100% timeliness at every meeting but my experience on average is woeful. If it were easier to join into a collaboration session, would lateness be less likely?. I've written before about integration of calendar information for the purpose of automatic and more meaningful presence integration. It can also be useful here. A calendar alert for the meeting pops up on my device and provides a one touch click to join a call. No fumbling around looking for the number or glancing between your calendar and call application/device. This should apply to any device you're on, not just PC collaboration clients. This will require a more standardized approach to calendar item entry but it's certainly achievable.

2. Roll Call. The next step is the usual, 'who's on the call?' roll call. Most unified communications solutions provide a visual view of participants. This certainly can help but often isn't available on all participants devices. One reason may be that it's present more for "PC" clients than it is desk or mobile "voice" clients. The Unified Communications toolbox can evolve to gather participant information, map it to contacts information, and use that to display a more complete participant list/info to the attendees on more device types. Business to business communications compounds this issue. It requires interoperability of collaboration systems and/or an easily accessible "client" application usable on communications devices with a display.

3. Roll Call # 2. Is the information to be discussed available to all; the 'Do you all have the file?' or, 'is the web conference up yet?' delays. How many times have you heard this? Too much time is spent checking email for the file, emailing it to those that don't have it, or waiting for all to be on the collaboration session. When needed, I'd like to click a button, pop up an email client pre-populating email addresses of all call attendees from the participant list, attach the file and out it goes. For the collaboration session, it too should be in the calendar invite and launched automatically at the same time you click the entry to join. Points 1 - 3 could easily total a 15 min or more of meeting productivity loss.

4. Actual Collaboration. Once the meeting is underway, there are pause points that impact productivity. In many solutions the collaboration is only partial. Most collaboration products have the concept of a host with that host controlling the presentation or editing. True collaboration needs to allow multi-party simultaneous edit or mark-up. Don't waste time promoting to presenter or switching between desktops of meeting participants. An ink application (one of my personal favorites) makes communication more specific, clear and real time especially if it's not restricted to one user at a time. Faster, uninterrupted participation is my end goal and need. I particularly like ink to "show" what I want changed or edited or to make a point rather than try to verbally describe it until the editor gets it right.

Delays and pauses like the examples above not only frustrate me at times, but they also have a real cost. What are your experiences, needs, and recommendations for improved collaboration and meetings? I look forward to your comments.