Improving meeting effectiveness by crowdsourcing

Meetings take up the most inelastic resource, time. Meetings are important, but they can take up valuable resources if not conducted effectively. I guess everyone has had his or her share of ineffective and time-wasting meetings where either the meeting purpose is not clear or the outcomes are not clear. More importantly, there was no easy way to give this feedback to the organizer. Now, with the help of IT, we can setup a whole new process.

Meeting Process

1. Organizer sets up the meeting
2. Organizer and the participants meet
3. [New step] After meeting, the participants give feedback with ubiquitous smart phone
4. [New step] Collect feedback from all meetings
5. [New step] Rate each meeting using new (to be defined by HR) data analysis algorithms in traditional SAP BW, HANA-powered SAP tools, BigData tools (like Hadoop) or any other tool up for the job.
6. [New step] This “crowdsourcing” rating will be automatically populated on the employee’s performance report

The rating provides information that will help the company draw up a good solution. One solution could be to offer training. Another solution could be to add a team member who could bridge the skill gap.

IT support is crucial to setting up this solution:

1. Organizer sets up the meeting. (Existing meeting tools like MS Outlook)
2. Organizer and the participants conduct the meeting. (Existing process)
3. [New step] After the meeting, the participants get a brief evaluation on their mobile app. They give their opinion about the meeting (IT needs to develop a smart phone app)
4. [New step] Collect feedback from all meetings. (IT has to roll out the app to as many users as possible)
5. [New step]Rate each meeting using data analysis algorithms in traditional SAP BW, HANA-powered SAP tools, BigData tools (like Hadoop) or any other tool up for the job. (IT has to build new backend system to collect meeting data from each user)
6. [New step] This ‘crowdsourcing’ rating will be automatically populated on the employee’s performance report. (Implement new calculation rules)

‘Improving meeting effectiveness by crowdsourcing’ is just an example of how technology convergence can help ‘RebuildHR manifesto’. We can leverage this concept to other skills that justifies building this infrastructure.