GroupSystems Survey Exposes Staff Meeting Obstacles; Typical staff meetings take around 50 minutes, 84 percent of people surveyed say they could be more efficient

Business Wire, Feb 6, 2006

DENVER -- GroupSystems Corporation, the premier global provider of Group Intelligence services and solutions, released today the results of a survey it conducted centering on the most pervasive form of interaction in organizations today - the staff meeting. Answered by more than 130 professionals working in diverse industry settings, the survey revealed that over 84 percent of respondents believed their staff meetings' efficiency could use improvement. Respondents most often cited irrelevant discussion, lack of closure, and unclear action item responsibility as the primary barriers to meetings' effectiveness.

Survey respondents' approximations of the length of their typical weekly staff meeting averaged around 50 minutes. Respondents estimated they could save 16 minutes, on average, from their typical meetings if inefficiencies were removed. For a department of ten people, this would save two hours and 40 minutes of staff time each week, or approximately 3.5 workweeks per year.

In addition to highlighting the prevalence of unnecessarily long staff meetings, the survey's results also point toward significant shortfalls in their effectiveness. 59 percent of respondents indicated they do not create minutes for the majority of their meetings, 56 percent said action items are documented only sometimes or not at all, and perhaps most strikingly, 68 percent say input arising from discussions is utilized only sometimes or rarely when implementing action items.

"This survey highlights real-world opportunities to improve collaborative meetings in nearly every work setting. Meetings don't have to be bad; with the right tools and techniques, they can produce clearly defined ideas and well-communicated plans that are ready for implementation," noted Dr. Robert Briggs, Associate Professor of Systems engineering for Delft University of Technology and Visiting Research Professor at University of Alaska Fairbanks. "This kind of actionable intelligence gives us a solid way forward."

GroupSystems offers a unique, structured and process-based software platform to help organizations conduct more effective meetings and innovation sessions, and ultimately, enable better organizational decision-making.

The survey was conducted between November 2005 and January 2006 among full-time professionals working in corporate, government, defense, education and non-profit settings. More than 500 professionals were invited to participate, resulting in more than 130 responses from organizations ranging from Intel to the US Navy to George Washington University.

About GroupSystems Inc.

For more than 16 years, GroupSystems Corporation has transformed traditional team meetings into efficient, collaborative events with a unique tool set for e-meetings, virtual meetings, and digital innovation sessions. Originally founded by IBM and the University of Arizona, today GroupSystems provides technology and solutions to the largest installed client base in collaborative thinking in the Government, Military and Civilian agency marketplaces. Such leading corporations as Proctor & Gamble, IBM, Glaxo Smith Kline, SAIC, and Raytheon utilize GroupSystems as their collaboration platform of choice to gather inputs, achieve consensus, make decisions, and develop high-performance plans. Currently, GroupSystems has almost 10,000 active customer software seats worldwide. Additional information may be viewed at www.groupsystems.com.