Do you dream about zero-inbox emails and more productive time in the office?

Do you dream about zero-inbox emails and few quick meetings a day? In my company, emails are used only to communicate with customers, suppliers and partners. We run our business with couple of meetings per week and all is done on time. This means that 70% of my time is with our clients and only 30% is spend on operational activities and my team. How do we do it? I did a quick 7 minutes video, where I give my top 3 tips on how to make office communication efficient. 

Im not saying it's easy to do this change. Im saying that once it’s implemented, everyone in your office will love the new way of working. Your employees will thank you for changing their old style of doing things in the office.

Before I tell you how I drove efficiency in my business, let me tell you why this is important. Here are the Harvard Business Review’s shocking stats on office time spent on emails and AskCody stats on time spent in meetings:

• on average executives spend 31 hours a week or almost 4 days in meetings and on emails
• each person in your team spend 28 hours a week, thats 3.5 days, purely on communicating with others.

Let’s split the standard office workflow in three main categories:

Category Nr1:

Weekly and daily planning and communication on ongoing activities

The majority of the companies are using emails and meetings to do their weekly planning and solve day-to-day issues. As you undoubtedly experience it on a daily base too, there is not much efficiency in doing it this way. About 5 years ago few companies decided to replace emails and meetings with smart applications like MS Teams, Slack, Workplace by Facebook and many more. The main reason is because one software combines chat, audio and video conference calls, screen and document share during calls, document share outside calls on a dedicated server space and so on. 

When I start using with my team one of those apps 80% of our emails disappeared and I gained 50% of the meeting time back to my calendar.

However, the key for success and getting such results is to change the mindset of your people. How to do it? Remind them that when they chat with friends on WhatsApp and FB groups they tag people, they share pictures and the whole conversation is one easy flow. It is exactly the same when they use chat applications but in the office - they tag people, share documents and communicate ongoing issues.

Did I hear you saying there is no way to give your team a chat application? You need to know that the human mentality is to chat less in group chats compared to the talk they do during meeting or amount of emails they write, copying the entire universe in Cc.

Category Nr2:

Shared documents

These are all documents like meeting memos, organisational charts and so on, which people use several times a week or a month. Then they spend time searching for them through their emails or lap tops, where they should not save documents on a first place, as an IT person would say. 

Using folders to organise and find emails wastes 14 minutes per day. Archiving emails into many folders using a mouse wastes 11 minutes per day. A bit less time takes to download an attachment, decide which folder to save it and then search through all files in that folder when you need a specific document.

By using a smart application and creating a dedicated space on it with good structure and relevant permissions of course, you are giving to your team the opportunity to be more efficient and better organised. Not to mention other benefits like less used space on hard disks and servers where the same document is saved thousands of times by each person in your head office. You can save money spent on more server space, archive space and licenses. I’m sure there are much more benefits than those I just mentioned.

Category Nr3

Weekly reporting and planning

Few years ago I read that the future of all kind of communication will be in video format. The forecast was that in 3 to 5 years all sort of chats will turn into short videos and stories. At that time I had 4 Project Managers, running 21 projects and I had to attend 7 different meetings every week covering risk, issues and dependancies, work-stream reviews, etc. In essence I spent 7 hours a week on weekly reporting and planning.

These stats about video format communication stuck in my head so I created a new way of reporting and planning called One Minute Update. I asked each project manager every Friday morning to record 1 minute video. In the first half they had to tell me a summary of the week and in the second half the priorities for the next week. So my 7 hours weekly meetings shrunk in 4 min but most importantly I knew everything I had to know for all 21 projects. Only by implementing this new way of communication my calendar free up with 6 hours and 56 min, which is almost 1 working day!

If you have 10 people that report directly to you, you will know everything in 10 min. No more long meetings, emails and conferences calls for your weekly reporting and planning.

Of course one of my people was too shy so she preferred to send me an audio message. It’s up to you if you want your people to report in audio or video format, most important is that you will know everything you need to know in super short time.

Now you know how I did it. All my current teams are using either audio or video messages to communicate with me. Its much quicker than email writing and reading.

 Remember this:

??Change the mindset of your people to start using such applications and stop doing meetings and emails. 

??Ask them to do the One Minute Update you learned here. All of you are going to get back a lot of your time so you can actually enjoy the days in the office!

Watch the full video on this weekly topic on my LinkedIn wall here

?? The Future of Your Business is part three of the series “The future of”. Tune in for the next week’s topic: The Future of AI in business

???? If this topic sparked an interest in you, click the Like button, so I can recognise the like-minded people around me.

???? Comment below what works best in your office - smart applications or meetings, conference calls and emails?

???? Have you ever used anything like One Minute Update?

Thank you lots,

Bilyana