Put your virtual hand up if you have been in a virtual meeting and found yourself feeling like virtual meetings just SUCK.
They might suck because you are busy managing your self-perception. They might suck because it is hard to focus, and they might simply suck because you daydream about a day you can see your colleagues face-to-face? It could be all of these, some of these or none these reason, but they do kinda suck. This is why qChange was launched, to make meetings better for the leader, the team, and the organization.
In July 2019, qChange was launched with my co-founders Rob Buckingham and John Howes. We set out to accomplish one thing: Use technology to create opportunities for employees’ to better connect around meetings. Our first product in the market is called Leader Experience. Leader Experience is a real-time end-to-end solution that prompts, measures, grows, and predicts leader success inside Microsoft Teams.
qChange Leader Experience Nudge Cycle
The Leader Experience was conceived from what we experienced; failed meetings, failed leadership during meetings, and failed opportunities to create meaningful connections in meetings. In our opinion, the best way to solve these problems is to create a tight behavioral loop (nudge-measure-feedback-growth) all around the meeting. However, there was a storm on the horizon that presented an opportunity.
Like so many other startups, we were directly impacted by COVID, but used our agility to seize the moment. What we saw is that meetings began to suck in a different way. Zoom/Team fatigue, self-perception issues, or just being present during a meeting all impacted how leaders led and the team showed up. And this was our opportunity.
Make meetings great again.
To accomplish this, we have created a proof-of-concept for the qChange Video Meeting Analysis solution (VMA). This solution connects to our Leader Experience product. It creates the most high-impact low friction meeting analysis tool on the market by assessing the speaker-listener interactions in a virtual meeting.
Imagine Tom (in the center of the video) gets a nudge immediately before a meeting inside Microsoft Teams to focus on succinct and direct. Five-minutes after the meeting, Tom is asked, ‘How succinct and direct were you in the meeting?’. Tom gives himself a 4 out of 5.
At the same time, Tom’s influencers, who Tom invited to help him grow, are asked, ‘How succinct, and direct was Tom in the meeting?’ The average score is 2.5 out of 5. This data is delivered to Tom in aggregate and anonymous…resulting in a real-time leader-team perception gap.
Tom is curious as to why there is a significant gap, so he pushes a button inside Microsoft Teams requesting written feedback. The written feedback request ask the influencers, ‘What was the situation you did or didn’t witness Tom being succinct and direct?’. ‘What were the actions Tom did or didn’t do to demonstrate being succinct and direct?’. And, ‘What impact did Tom’s behavior have on you in the meeting?’. Again, all written feedback is delivered in real-time and anonymously.
Next, Tom submits the recorded virtual meeting to VMA. In return, he receives a transcript of the meeting, speaker times, sentiment analysis, and markers of all the places succinct and direct occurred in the meeting. This is all presented in a clickable video player, so Tom can play all the moments. We use Tom’s Leader Experience results, coupled with the VMA results, to create an industry first-team relationship metric.
Our Ask of You
As noted, our Leader Experience is available in Microsoft Teams today: Click here to get it. You receive a free 30-day trial.
Like any startup that has a big idea, we need others to believe in it. We are slated to launch VMA in Q1 2021, and if you want to get early access to help qChange hone the product, please get on the list: www.qchange.com/meetingexperience. The top 5 referrers will get a lifetime subscription to VMA.
If you have in thoughts, please email me at jkelley@qchange.com
James Kelley, Ph.D.,
CEO of qChange