Meetings are probably the most actionable way of transforming business organization
At Wisembly, we’re profitable again & we are launching a new product. Here is what we have learned along the way.
In 2017, we had the highest year ever in booking, we are profitable again, we are launching a new product, and our team is more engaged than ever. All of this with half the people we had last year. Here is what we have learned along the way.
Companies’ operating system is changing
Until the very beginning of the 21st century, projects were basically “Job Descriptions” and were carried out by employees who agreed to be supervised in exchange for a salary paid by everlasting companies.
Today, projects are becoming the norm. They are increasingly complex, need to be executed fast and require the collaboration of several very skilled employees assembled in dedicated teams. These employees look for purpose over paychecks or status in a world where 15 Fortune-500 companies disappear every year due to a lack of adaptation and innovation.
2016 made us realize that our organization was not fit anymore. It restricted employee engagement, blocked agility and had a very negative impact on our innovative capacity. We decided that rather than changing our selling methods, refine our product roadmap, or the way we market our products, we should first start by changing our organization.
We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
Albert Einstein
How we changed Wisembly’s operating system
At Wisembly, we no longer have managers. Employees define their objectives and choose the projects they want to work on. There are strict rules about how decisions are made and how and why we hold meetings. Annual performance reviews have been replaced by monthly 360 feedbacks. And it’s only a start, many changes are still to come.
This move allowed us to achieve in 9 months what we had planned to do in 12 months with a bigger team. As a founder, this kind of experience raises several questions: What happened? Is there a quick way to transform a company’s organization? Could this be replicated by other companies? Would it have worked five or six years ago?
Organic organizations, Holacracy and other types of self-managed organizations seem to be very powerful but are complicated to set up quickly.
Reshaping meetings for seamless collaboration
We started by changing the way we meet. For a meeting company, this seemed the most obvious and like a quick-win. We used to have an agenda packed with the same recurring meetings: team meeting, project meeting, 1:1…. People attended because they had to. It was more about information sharing than producing decisions and solutions. These meetings costed a lot of time to Wisembly, created poor outcomes and ultimately broke the collaboration in the company.
We deleted the team meetings and 1:1 meetings, redefined the project meetings and added a few new formats. Most importantly we changed the way we were collaborating during these meetings and in between. Participants’ personal preparation, decision recording, actions assignment and follow-up from one meeting to another.
We started actually producing solid outcomes. Decisions were made faster. People actively participated. Our employees were more involved in our projects. Ultimately projects were delivered faster.
We understood that meetings were the cornerstone of business collaboration and that it was probably the most broken process in today’s business world.
Therefore, we completely rebuilt our product from scratch based on this idea that better & fewer meetings are the first step to reshape collaboration in a company.
Today, we are introducing Wisembly Jam: a simple tool that makes it possible to collaborate in a new way: prepare meetings more quickly, avoid those that are useless, improve employee involvement and thus innovate more quickly.
After several months of hard work, we are officially launching Wisembly Jam today. We’ve been on Product Hunt since this morning. Feel free to give us some feedback.
