Ray Gillenwater CEO, SpeakUp

getspeakup.com @raygwater @getspeakup

Less Email and Fewer Meetings The Best Communication Tools and Processes at Work

Who Am I?

Co-Founder and CEO of SpeakUp

Ex Managing Director at BlackBerry

Student of Communications

First, a big picture question:

How does your company achieve it’s mission?

I like the Execution* Definition

*Great book, check it out: Execution - The Discipline of Getting Things Done (Larry Bossidy)

• You need awesome people

• You need a great strategy

• You have to connect people to the strategy so that it’s more than

words on a page

How Do You Connect People + Strategy?

• With efficient operations. But there’s a catch:

• Operations have a fundamental requirement: communication

• Which poses a problem...

Most Companies Are Doing It Wrong

• Communication is sometimes one way (top down)

• Hopefully lateral

• And rarely bottom-up

Which Means…

• Companies are not tapping into the collective wisdom of their teams

• There is too much disorganized information, which slows down

decision making

• Most employees don’t put in extra effort - it’s too hard to make a

tangible impact

Some Symptoms Include:

Too many meetings

• 62 per employee per month

• 34% of time spent is wasted

• While 9/10 people admit to daydreaming

Too much unstructured chatter (signal vs. noise)

• Email, Skype, Hangouts, Slack, Hipchat

• 40% of your team’s time is spent on admin

So What Can You Do About It?

You need a set of communication guidelines that match your culture: • How: What tools - online/offline?

• Why: Coordination, updates, escalation, brainstorming?

• When: When are meetings acceptable? How soon should emails be replied to?

• Who: Depending on the above?

Tactics to experiment with (situation dependent): • “No meetings allowed” days

• Ban internal emails

Tools - Which Ones?

More can be done online, asynchronously

Be sure to cover three basic categories: 1. Day to day coordination and casual discussion

2. Consensus building & decision making

3. Managing & implementing decisions that were made

Litmus test: can you replace a meeting?

Casual Discussions & Coordination

Plenty of options: • Email (please no!), Slack, Hipchat, Chatter

• PICK ONE! Having to manage multiple = more overhead

• Get everyone onboard! Even those resistant to change.

Consensus Building & Decision Making

Not many options (that’s why we created SpeakUp)

Requirements we had in mind when we built SpeakUp: • Anyone can share an idea or a problem

• Conversations are structured

• Posts are votable to cut through clutter - focus team’s attention on important items

• Decision making is transparent so the team knows what decision was made and WHY

Managing & Implementing Decisions

Plenty of options: • Excel (please no!), Trello, Basecamp, Jira

• PICK ONE! Having to manage multiple = more overhead

• Get everyone onboard! Even those resistant to change.

What Do We Use At My Company?

For context: 15-20 people, across multiple global time-zones

Slack (internal email is banned) • To stay in touch and coordinate work in progress

SpeakUp (recurring meetings are few, impromptu is rare) • When someone has an idea for a new product, feature, marketing opportunity, etc

• When there is a problem and the solution is unclear (usually product or process)

Trello (everyone knows what their weekly priorities are) • To track decisions made in SpeakUp (it integrates with Trello)

• Assign status, priority, who’s working, what needs to to be done and by when

What Should You Use At Your Company?

• First gather the information: what’s your current situation?

• What are the major problems that need to be solved?

• What requirements must your process/tools meet?

• Establish processes and subscribe to tools that tick those boxes

...But please don’t call another meeting to discuss it!

Self-promotion: Use SpeakUp to capture & vote on problems, it’s free

What Should You Use At Your Company?

To execute, you need awesome people and a great strategy. But that’s not enough -

you need to connect people & strategy

To do so, you need effective operations - driven by communication • But communication isn’t just one way • And it doesn’t need to be in your inbox or in a meeting room

And if you fail to enable your people to execute they will: • Become paycheck collectors (only 13% of global employees are engaged) or • Sabotage everyone’s hard work (24% are actively disengaged) or • Go work somewhere else

...and define how your company communicates

So do what’s best for everyone

Thank you!

Ray Gillenwater CEO, SpeakUp

getspeakup.com @raygwater @getspeakup

Feel free to contact me with questions