Sherpany DISCOURS®: Collaborative Agenda Setting and Meeting Preparation

ZURICH, Nov. 1, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Sherpany announces the release of Sherpany DISCOURS, a set of features built into the Sherpany Boardroom, facilitating the collaboration in the agenda setting and meeting preparation process. Another proof of Sherpany keeping its brand promise to give users time back when it comes to leadership meetings on the Executive and Board level.

3 benefits of Sherpany DISCOURS

• When setting the agenda, meeting organizers can now selectively publish an agenda to e.g. the chairperson of a meeting and pre-discuss the agenda in a secure environment using DISCOURS. This saves a lot of synchronisation time between meeting organizers and meeting leaders. #gettimeback
• When reading meeting materials to prepare important discussions, meeting participants can now use comments to discuss them among participants using DISCOURS before the meeting takes place. Thanks to this asynchronous process, individual preparation time is used more collaboratively and effectively and the meeting itself can focus on the relevant discussion points only. #gettimeback
• When writing the minutes, DISCOURS provides a great overview of key topics and main questions raised and discussed before and during a meeting. DISCOURS empowers meeting organisers to write minutes faster and with a higher accuracy. #gettimeback

The rationale behind

The average working day, especially for senior management, is usually packed with meetings and the preparation uses up to 153 hours per month*. However, 83% of managers describe meetings as the biggest time loser for themselves as well as for others.** Due to various reasons, meetings have been a waste of people's valuable time. One of the largest time consumers being the alignment on the agenda to be discussed.

Until now, the agenda setting process included a lot of back and forth between meeting organizers and the chairperson of the meeting. Often this is done in physical one-on-ones or by exchanging files via email.

Looking further at the current way alignment on key meeting discussion points are done, there is almost no structured process in place to manage collective meeting preparation efforts. Meaning, every participant prepares himself and identifies his key questions but they are not shared amongst participants nor aligned. When the meeting starts, we usually first have to align on the open questions, filter out what is not important, and then resolve misunderstandings on the pre-readings.

This problem has now a simple solution: Sherpany DISCOURS. The first discussion wall is fully integrated into the Sherpany Boardroom. With Sherpany DISCOURS, meeting organizers can discuss agenda items with their chairperson before the meeting is published in a secure environment. Meeting participants can synchronize on questions and issues while preparing for a meeting. Supporting a transparent, asynchronous way of discussing and aligning on key questions, Sherpany frees up a lot of group time for all parties involved in meetings.

"We believe digital transformation should enable us all to stop the meeting madness in the enterprise world and to bring meetings to the next level. We have increased efficiency of individual working time of our workforce with hundreds of digital tools tremendously. Hence looking at meetings, we do it more or less the same way as 20 years ago and the tools have not much evolved. While individual productivity became more efficient thanks to numerous IT tools, group time spent in meetings remains on a productivity level of the '90s. It's time to disrupt. With Sherpany, we free up millions of hours of privileged workers wasted in unproductive meetings to invest them into value-adding activities such as deep thinking and real problem solving. Sherpany DISCOURS is one more piece of the puzzle to disrupt meeting management and to increase efficiency of group time spent in meetings," says Sherpany's CEO Tobias Häckermann.

Sherpany DISCOURS is integrated into the Sherpany Boardroom and will be released in phases to all our customers without additional charges. If you want to learn how it works and how it can help you save valuable time in your leadership meetings, reach out to your customer success manager or to [email protected].

About Sherpany

SHERPANY is the fastest growing start-up headquartered in Switzerland with offices in Lisbon, Milan, Paris, Berlin, Wroclaw and Zurich. Our mission is to stop the meeting madness. We build innovative, mobile solutions for board and executive committees. With our technology we turn leadership meetings from time-wasters into value-creators by driving focus on the output. We encourage the evolution of meeting culture through a delightful, easy to use and secure meeting management software to drive focus on decision making and to free up the wasted meeting time for value-adding work. According to our customers, we are the leading premium partner for large  and medium-sized enterprises when it comes to transforming the culture and management of formal meetings.

More about Sherpany on www.sherpany.com

*Source: 2013-2014 NACD public company governance survey
**Source: Stop the Meeting Madness, by Leslie A. Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley and Eunice Eun in the Harvard Business Review

Media Contact: 
Mathias Brenner
+41 78 754 80 30

SOURCE Sherpany

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