Finally – an app that tracks your meeting volume and quality and helps you improve

Regular readers will know that we’ve been working for decades to help companies radically reduce the number of meetings and improve the quality of the ones that remain. Read on for a great new tool to support this – mScore, and an opportunity to be one of the first 3 customers who will receive a free meeting effectiveness assessment.

In our book Kill Bad Meetings and our effective meetings training we’ve helped many organizations and individuals to make significant time savings and quality improvements.

Survey data constantly shows the scope of the problem, for example recent surveys have shown that

• 71% of office workers state meetings are unproductive and inefficient and 45% say that meetings prevent them doing their job
• $560bn is wasted annually in the US from poor meetings, and £191bn in UK

Meetings are often a business’ largest unmanaged cost, partly because

• the cost of meetings is often hidden in lots of individuals and departmental time and expense budgets – the true scale is often invisible
• the quality of meetings is hard to discern at an organizational level due to the lack of good data around this
• people have got used to poor quality meetings and think they are unavoidable

Finally, now there is an app that helps with this. mScore is a Microsoft Teams application that delivers real time insights to help you deliver better meetings, improve productivity, and save time. It enables you to measure meeting volumes, costs, quality, cancellation rates and changes over time at an individual meetings level and for your department or organization.

In the interests of full disclosure, the company was to some extent inspired by reading our book Kill Bad Meetings and when the founders reached out to us to discuss collaboration, we decided not only to collaborate, but to invest.

We think this will be a great tool for making the business case for more effective meetings and for giving people real insights and metrics for reducing and improving meetings.

In our own work we have found that people spend more than two days per week in meetings and about 50% of the content of these is irrelevant. We believe it’s got worse during the pandemic as the number of virtual meetings has increased sharply and people are experiencing diaries stuffed with back-to-back meetings.

There is a real opportunity here for people to win back significant time and reduce the frustration of unnecessary meetings.

At this stage the technology is up and running and we have done some initial work with test clients. We are now looking to sign up to 3 organizations as beta customers. if you are interested you will get a free assessment of your meeting effectiveness. This will include:

• Time spent in meetings
• Cost of meetings
• Date and time meeting trends
• Percent of recurring meetings vs single instance meetings
• Meeting cancelation rate by meeting type
• Meeting acceptance rate vs decline rates
• Percent of working day spent in meetings
• Changes year on year
• And more

The first report is completely free.

One of our Global Integration consultants will also join the first report feedback session and add some free recommendations on how these measures can be improved.

You can find out more at https://mscore.app/ or contact stuart@mscore.app to apply to be one of the next 3 customers.

And, of course, you can continue to engage with us for training to reduce the number and improve the quality of your meetings based on the output of the mScore reports.