According to a Harvard Business Review survey some 65% of of executives say meetings prevent them from completing their own work and 71% say meetings are unproductive and ineffective. Enter Time Is Ltd., a Prague-based startup that has developed a software-as-a-service offer that it promises will deliver 21st century productivity analytics to companies with more than 500 employees. The aim is to give companies a global view of how much time employees and departments are spending on meetings and digital communications and help them figure out how to become more productive by freeing people up to do more relevant things.
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« In a company of 1000 people each employee has an average of 50 meetings. That is 50,000 people hours a month. If you could cut meeting time and be 10% more productive you could save a lot, » says Jan Rezab, a serial entrepreneur who also founded Socialbakers, one of the world’s largest social analytics firms with over 2,500 clients.
Time Is Ltd. helps companies analyze internally public data such as shared calendars and public Slack channels. It looks at calendar events to understand time spent between departments, how much time is spent externally and how it develops over time. It analyzes Slack channels to see who communicates with who on a team level and how teams use and communicate on Slack. It also offers a meeting rating platform that allows participates to rank every meeting.
So how much is too much time spent in meetings? « No one knows because nobody has studied how time is spent at companies at scale , » says Rezab, Time Is Ltd.’s founder. But there are some important indicators. « There is a certain threshold that is non-healthy for certain jobs, » he says. « For instance, if you are a developer and spending 80 hours a week in meetings and only getting a third of the work done or if you are a manager with 20 years of industry experience and you are spending the majority of your week in meetings then you are more like an air traffic controller and not able to do the job of an experienced manager. »
Companies also have no way of measuring digital productivity tools like Slack, Facebook Workplace or Microsoft Team. « These kind of channels are so new that there is very little data on how people really use them, » says Rezab. « People are getting bombed with info from different parts of the company so there is a feeling of being always on that pushes people to check these channels all the time , which can take focus time away, » says Rezab. « Focus time –time when you are not in meetings, receive no digital communications and actually do work — is becoming smaller and smaller and the trend is going in the wrong direction in every company in the world. We believe every CEO should take note of what happens in their companies and all team members would benefit from having an understanding of how the company works, » Rezab says.
The company has raised €3 million in venture capital. Its clients include the Vienna-based financial group of Ceská Sporitelna (Erste Group), which has 10,000 employees, and several large tech companies.
