Tausi Insider

As companies are adapting to new ways of working at varying speeds, there is a need for organizations, teams and individuals to optimize and prioritize along new dimensions: What work is best suited in-office versus remote? What is best accomplished synchronously versus asynchronously? How can we rethink and revitalize meetings so we aren’t stuck in meetings all day with no time to think or do? Many employees are overstretched and overwhelmed, finding there aren’t enough hours in the day to deliver on commitments. According to Microsoft’s September 2022 Work Trends Index , 48 per cent of employees and 53 per cent of managers say they are already burned out. In the same report, it was noted that last spring, meetings had increased by 153 per cent since the start of the pandemic, “double bookings” increased by 46 per cent in the last year and, in an average week, 42 per cent of participants multitask during meetings. This goes to show that, in many cases, there is no slack in the syste...

Canada’s most prominent banks and insurers say they are sticking with the virtual or hybrid annual general meetings they adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic for another year. The group of 12 banks and insurers say they recently obtained a court order allowing them to hold the meetings in these formats again. Though they acknowledge the COVID-19 situation has improved this year, they say they want to use virtual and hybrid meetings because the virus is so “unpredictable.” They add that using the formats will also allow them to respect protocols recommended by public health authorities. The group, which includes Royal Bank of Canada, TD Bank Group, Sun Life Financial Inc. and Manulife Financial Corp., were granted a similar order in March 2020, December 2020 and December 2021. Rounding out the group are Bank of Montreal, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Canadian Western Bank, Laurentian Bank, Bank of Nova Scotia, National Bank, Great-West Lifeco and Canada Life. https://www.ta...

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. A few weeks ago, I got into an interesting discussion on LinkedIn about the value of meetings. The exchange started with this post , wherein I broke down the cost of a 90-minute meeting I'd just sat through. By prorating the salaries of everyone involved, I calculated that the hour and a half we spent cost our company $1,826. Then, I asked the person who ran it if he thought it was worth the money. We didn't have that meeting again. In the post's numerous comments, some people agreed with me and proposed things like including the cost of a meeting in each invite. Others mentioned how they'd made similar calculations while consulting, and quoted some astronomical annual costs for their companies. A notable comment cohort wasn't quite as big on my cost-counting idea, however, and pointed out that putting a dollar amount on everything we do was a "1950s way of thinking," an...

Meetings are valuable for most organizations, most of the time. Meetings build the cohesion that makes teams what they are. monkeybusinessimages/iStockPhoto / Getty Images Karl Oczkowski is the senior director of corporate communications and public relations at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. As business leaders rush to applaud Shopify’s announcement that it will drastically limit meetings across the company, we would be wise to remember that novel solutions apply only under novel circumstances – and few organizations are as novel as Shopify. Meetings, when done right, are not the enemy of productivity but a part of it. Surely we’ve all spent a day tied up in a fruitless e-mail exchange over a complicated issue, only to later wonder how much more quickly a solution would have surfaced had everyone simply been together – in a quick meeting. The appeal of Shopify’s decision, which emphasizes execution over discussion for its entirely remote work force, is easy to understand, and the ...