In recent years, many commercial organizations have undergone major improvements by working Lean. Lean working is a method in which all wastage in a process is eliminated in order to achieve maximum value. Removing wastage from the process lowers costs, which leads to improvement in corporate result. Smart, lean management Since its inception, this lean way of managing has not only become important for commercial organizations. Owing to budgetary pressure and an increasing demand for transparency by the public, the public sector is having to make even further cuts. So it’s high time to lower costs and improve quality. But...
5 tips for meetings with an Olympic touch
A summer when the Olympic Games take place always has a bit of extra atmosphere. Who in Holland can forget the 2000 summer Olympics in Sydney when the Netherlands won no less than 12 gold medals, thanks largely to the feats of Pieter van den Hoogenband, Inge de Bruijn and Leontien Van Moorsel? It takes quite a lot to win such a medal. A top athlete’s entire life focuses on training programs and optimum fitness. But good focus is also important in meetings. Did you know that a person’s maximum attention span is only 45 minutes? So for the best...
Optimum meetings at the end of the working day: 4 tips
For many professionals for whom meetings are commonplace, the working day doesn't end at 17.00 hours. Whether you work at a comprehensive school, hospital, government institution or commercial company: it's not always possible to get all colleagues together in the daytime. Other things often just need to be done from 9 to 5. Evening meetings? They're everywhere! After a hard day's work however, the clogged conference lurks just around the corner. Not in your veins this time, but in your organization. Especially when faced with regularly recurring and time-consuming meetings. Are you ready to clear the clogging in the conference...
Paperless municipal meetings a mission impossible?
The topic comes up time and again in every company: valuable work time shouldn’t be wasted on long meetings. This is unsurprising, if you realize that the average employee meets 6.5 hours. Although the meeting process in companies can often be easily streamlined, municipalities face greater challenges when it comes to updating meetings. Municipal meetings consist of many hierarchal layers and a large number of employees are involved: not only during, but also before and after the meeting. The more organized the meeting process, the fewer man-hours and costs. And a more efficient meeting process requires fewer paper documents, that...
Meeting trend 5.0: teleporting yourself and your colleagues
Teleporting yourself during a meeting, moving into another space? It sounds like you have landed in a science fiction film that even surpasses Star Trek… And still, it is becoming reality. And developing at the speed of light. Visual trend Our communication methods have become increasingly visual. Posts with visuals and videos are much more quickly clicked than text-only messages. The average website also uses a lot of imagery and little text. This trend is being followed in the conference room. Although online meetings are increasing exponentially, for instance via Skype, Facetime of Google Hangouts, real eye contact is lacking,...
Optimize tablet use through digital meetings
Professional use of tablets is becoming increasingly popular. According to a study by Strategy Analytics projects the commercial use of tablets will continue to have a compound annual growth rate of 6% through 2020. By then it is projected that approximately 110,2 million tablets will have been sold for business use worldwide. According to this study, a tablet is becoming increasingly important as a workplace tool and that therefore more IT departments have developed correct policies to assure the secure use of tablets in the workplace. CPB: paperless working becomes standard By now the employees of the Centraal Planbureau (CPB) are...
4 tips for safe digital meetings
Your confidential meeting documents on the street...or lost. Perish the thought! And yet, it still happens regularly. Just last month secret negotiation documents concerning the TTIP free trade agreement were made public. They included confidential information that was intended for a top-secret meeting. That certainly turned out completely different than the intention. And the result was exceptionally painful. How secure are your meeting documents? Security concerning meetings is never easy. People are people, and thus they lose printed documents, leaving them in the back of a taxi or forget them in the photocopier. If you want to reduce the risk...
Municipal decision-making optimized by digital meetings
Making decisions is never easy. Organizations don’t like to rush into things and thus we meet a lot. When it comes to government, decision-making follows a long and arduous path. Do you hold a position in a bureaucratic agency, for instance, in a municipality? Then you know better than anyone how many layers of hierarchy each proposal must go through. Eventually the proposals to the city council, often still on paper. And after that, the documents often need to be forwarded to committees and the board. This means an investment of an enormous amount of time and money in unnecessary...
