Finally, Friday afternoon arrived. It has been a very busy week spent juggling several urgent activities involving multiple people, both inside and outside your organization. Time to take stock of this taxing week and plan for the next.
You don’t draw conclusions all by yourself; as always, the sacred 1:1 recurring meeting with your boss is there in your calendar at 4:30 pm local time, and you foretaste showing off your great progress that will make you shine.
You join the virtual meeting early, so your boss joins after you and notices that you are always on time. However, you find yourself on the bridge all alone for a few minutes and your boss is not showing up.
Eight minutes go by and you are wondering what happened; you have an intuition, you check the email and discover that, at 4:29 pm, you unexpectedly received an updated 1:1 meeting invitation from your boss, for Tuesday at 10:00 am. You feel disappointed and you think: “perhaps, something urgent came up, which is more important than spending time with me…”.
You look at your schedule and you notice that the meeting your boss just moved to Tuesday conflicts with another event you scheduled 10 days ago with another team; that event has been already rescheduled once.
Time to play calendar Tetris… again!
You open your scheduling assistant to figure out a new slot to propose to your boss, but her calendar is completely booked until Thursday afternoon. You can’t wait that long, because you need her input to move forward.
You start thinking about possible solutions:
- “Should I call her? Naah, she won’t respond.”
- “Should I message her (or her Executive Assistant) and ask for an earlier slot? Maybe she will think I am a pain in the neck.”
- “Should I reschedule my conflicting meeting again? Maybe it’s the lesser evil.”
You end up accepting your boss’s rescheduling proposal; in the end, she is the one who evaluates your performance and you want to be accommodating.
Then, you open your Teams or Slack, find the channel with the team you have the overlapping meeting with, and blast a message where you sincerely apologize for the urgent matter that unfortunately triggered the reschedule of Tuesday’s meeting.
You open the scheduling assistant to find the next available slot for everybody, and it’s next Wednesday. You select it and send an updated invitation.
A collective decision is now delayed by 8 days… Bummer!
At least, you will be able to move the needle faster, thanks to your boss’s input. You can finally close your laptop and start enjoying the weekend.
The daily firefight
Tuesday comes and it’s 9:30 am; soon, you will be able to receive the input you have been craving for. However, as the priorities for the day take shape, your boss decides to push the meeting towards the end of the day. Another Calendar Tetris round has started.
You try to rationalize what is happening, and tell yourself things like: “I don’t really care, in the end, I am paid also to accommodate my boss’s needs”. But you know that is not what you feel. In fact, every reschedule is a stab in the heart of your self-image. Your mind starts worrying:
- “I am part of his team, why am I less important than whatever is happening?”
- “Are my peers receiving the same treatment, or am I the only neglected report?”
- “Is my job not important?”
- “Is my boss not trusting me enough?”
- “Am I at risk of losing my job?”
According to a Reclaim.ai study, 42.4% of one-on-one meetings are rescheduled, every single week.
In addition to being a huge waste of costly resources, frequent reschedules are also a massive missed opportunity for managers, who could dramatically improve the work experience of their team of reports, increasing their motivation and productivity.
Instead, many bosses do everything possible to keep their distance, for example:
- They disrespectfully move recurrent 1:1 meetings around without any explanation, generating unnecessary and demotivating overhead for the people they manage.
- They allow people working for them to reach out only by scheduling a meeting with their executive assistant.
The illusion of scheduling and planning
In our individualistic Western society, high productivity is often associated with optimizing our own time, rather than “donating” some of that time to the higher collective goal. Hence, the emerging collaboration paradigm evolved into raising communication barriers and letting the calendar script dictate the sequence of activities to be executed.
This paradigm makes moderate sense on paper, until fast-evolving markets and high uncertainty trigger a constant rearrangement of plans and schedules, causing tremendous coordination cost and inefficiency.
The paradox we often encounter is: the more bosses find themselves under pressure, the harder it is to talk to them (barriers go up), the more they tend to optimize and overschedule every single activity in an attempt to control uncertainty, which in turn clashes with their emerging priorities and triggers higher coordination costs to accommodate changes of plan.
What happens when you call instead of meeting?
I would like you to imagine what you feel when your boss (or boss’s boss) calls you unexpectedly, because she suddenly needs you to solve an important problem.
In that case, how do you feel?
Right, you feel good. You feel useful, resourceful, appreciated, engaged.
So, why does our morale have to succumb to rescheduling, instead of being energized by instant collaboration?
Because we have too many meetings, and instant conversations no longer work. What’s the current solution? You guessed it right: more meetings. It’s a vicious cycle that hinders productivity and morale.
How do we break the vicious cycle and provide a better experience, at the same time?
I want you to imagine having a magic wand. What would be the ideal experience when you need to talk to your boss or a direct report?
You think about it, and it happens magically at the right time for both you and the other person, through the right communication app. At Tweelin, we call it Digital Serendipity™.
Now, imagine the conversations with your boss or direct reports following this new paradigm:
- No more demoralizing rescheduling and cancellations
- Mo more “Calendar Tetris”
- Faster decisions
- Better relationships between bosses and reports
- Higher employee retention
Wouldn’t it be a game changer?
Digital Serendipity™ quantifiable impact
In theory, it would be a game changer… how about in practice?
The measurable impact of Digital Serendipity corresponds to a workforce average productivity increase of 4%, calculated as monetary value of time savings divided by overall cost of personnel. Intuitively, the productivity increase for meeting-heavy roles is often much higher than the average.
In addition to these hard metrics, there’s a potentially more impactful value in terms of faster decisions and employee satisfaction and retention, which is company-specific and difficult to generalize.
Sounds good, but how do you handle recurrent meetings?
You might be tempted to say: “a 1:1 meeting is a recurrent event in your calendar, how do you make it serendipitous?”
You can leave it as-is in the calendar, however, instead of sticking to the original slot, you let the Digital Serendipity AI handle the connection. In the end, doesn’t it get rescheduled almost half of the time anyway? You might as well try, right?
Let’s try then!
Tweelin’s Digital Serendipity™ features a 30-day free trial for up to 500 users. Yes, you heard it right: five hundred.