Return on Time
Save Time and Bandwidth For Decision-Makers
Optimize Team-Wide Meeting Culture
Improve Your Workplace Experience
Teach Your Teams to Optimize Their Presentation Style
How much time and money could be saved every year by rooting out inefficient meetings? What if you could optimize them with the same focus, rigor, and precision you bring to, say, IT or accounting? With a communications expert, trained to focus on this single issue, it’s surprisingly easy to do just that. When you eliminate bad scheduling, bad preparation, bad organization, and bad speakers, you claw back dozens –hundreds? -- of hours per month for your team. It’s hardly rocket science. It’s a simple matter of measuring communications performance like you measure anything else.
Every minute wasted through poorly prioritized, poorly structured, poorly delivered communication is time diverted from making decisions, driving strategy, and moving your business forward.
Return on Time requires no massive organizational disruption. It’s a surgical, efficient three-step process.
1) Full diagnostic
Interviews & audit to map decision-makers’ preferences. How does each manager like to receive information from their direct reports? What’s specific to each manager that might be different from others? What do they feel is a waste of time in terms of meetings (all types)? We’ll take a stab at measuring meeting efficiency to compare results of the program. Intial time required from each leader: ~60-90 minutes over a period of one month. [12 hours?]
Meeting Review Level 1 (higher/macro level). Remainder of the team polled for suggestions about meeting inefficiencies. Which meetings are poorly or unthinkingly scheduled, inefficient, unnecessary, overlong, and tend to invite participants who don’t need to be involved? Measure overall time spent in meetings. Break meeting time into categories. A rough attempt will be made to calculate total number of minutes lost to wasted meeting time. How much does this cost the organization? What’s the reward for fixing the problem? [25 hours?]
Meeting Review Level 2 (content and delivery). JBowe will audit meetings [perhaps better if they’re recorded] to observe where time is being wasted with formalities/ informalities, poor planning, poor content, poor performance, and bad/ overcomplicated decks. A fair working assumption will be that nearly everyone, from top to bottom, can use improvement, and that nearly everyone can say what they need to say 20%-25% more quickly and effectively. Again, a rough attempt will be made to calculate total number of minutes lost to wasted meeting time. How much does this cost the organization? What’s the reward for fixing the problem? [30 hours?]
Training
Team training begins. Group workshop to lay out JB basic principles and toolkit (can accommodate 6 to 25 participants, in-person, 90 mins to 4 hours, with exercises, possible homework required, probable follow-up exercises required. This could take place as a half-day workshop or 4 separate workshops).
Speech and presentations skills takeaway:
Communications foundation lesson
Audience analysis
How to sharpen and distill the focus, purpose, and scope for any and every meeting
How to introduce and organize any talk, meeting, or presentation
How to choose words and date to perform more effectively in a presentation
How to make slides simple, accessible, and fewer in number
How to speak with purpose, punch, confidence, authenticity, and persuasiveness
How to rehearse and align your voice, body movement, word choices, and emotions with your material so you feel calm, confident, and competent
Virtual meeting habits 101—sound, lighting, camera angle, eye contact,
1:1 follow-up training.
Direct reports are trained in general—additional practice with delivery; then follow up with continued, real-life meetings
Direct reports are trained to communicate upstream to managers in response to manager feedback.
Feedback period from top managers: has the training been effective? How effective?
Continued 1:1 with team members until everyone reaches their goal and optimal efficiency
Objectives
Reduced rambling. They’ll get to the point faster and with confidence.
Insights, not just information. You’ll hear more easily what matters.
Meetings become strategic conversations, not endurance tests.
Fewer follow-ups. You’ll get everything you need the first time.
Stronger executive presence. They’ll command the room like leaders, not just employees.
Greater workplace engagement and satisfaction. Your team will feel more useful and appreciated when they’re able to share their insights and demonstrate the intelligence you hired them for.
Fine-tuning and evaluation
During these processes, feedback is continuously gathered regarding Meeting Review Level 1 and recommendations for workflow redesign will be implemented with the help of management. Agendas will be made more formal or submitted in advance (where necessary). Routine meetings that serve no purpose will be reduced.
Wrap up / Review with managers
Follow up/ continued polishing as needed and/or catching up with newly added team members