According to Atlassian, unnecessary meetings cost the US economy $37b a year in wasted salary costs.

In fact, per the same study, half of all meetings are considered “wasted time”.

What differentiates a successful meeting from a failed one? How do we make sure our meetings are consistently successful?

In this article, we’ll discuss the fundamentals of how to run a successful meeting; the 7 key steps advocated by MIT professor Neal Hartman.

And we’ll share with you our internal method for running meetings in a structured manner with Process Street.

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Efficiency is vital for startups to scale and survive. To be efficient you have to document your processes to make everything repeatable and scalable.

All of which means nothing if your processes are bad.

“Process innovation” is a fancy term for improving your business’ processes. Instead of haphazardly solving external issues, you focus on improving your core processes and standard operating procedures to make your business efficient and able to grow.
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It’s not always easy to know whether your team is doing everything you ask them to. How do you know everything is on track? Are you sure your team is taking care of every responsibility?

Here’s the worrying thing:

According to the American Management Association, 21% of companies believe that 30-50% of their employees shirk from their responsibilities. This is stupidly high. So, we need to see how it can be resolved and take action right now.

Accountability in the workplace, in short, refers to your team members taking responsibility for their actions and for the tasks they’ve been assigned.

In this post, I’m going to cover 4 key areas which pertain to managing the accountability of employees:

• Communication and company culture
• Productivity
• Clear processes and workflows
• Oversight

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“How did they make this?”

I find myself asking this while playing games, and after doing some digging ingenious stories of building communities and managing resources came to light.

In other words, startups (and SaaS companies as a whole) are closer to agile game development than you would think. The core business processes may differ, but valuable lessons can be applied in terms of managing resources and organizing your priorities.

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I know, you want to cut out admin work. You want to cut out time wasted on bullshit that doesn’t directly impact traction.

It’s hard to pull yourself away from product and marketing for any extended period of time to focus on how efficiently your startup runs internally, but it does have to be done.

Srinivas Kulkarni, writing for ZDNet, reports:

“While it’s very easy to say that when startups are founded, there’s a lot of freedom, liberty and access in terms of work and building the product, technology or service that they offer, it is also important to realize that most startups fail because they don’t learn from their and others’ mistakes. It’s imperative that the experience comes from a process.”

A lot of the problems processes solve can seem like they’re easily fixed on the day they crop up, and it can seem like there’s no point in writing down how you do work when you’re too busy to even get it all done…

But any good startup will scale, analyze the ways it gets work done, and will try to improve its efficiency — that’s just what organizations that succeed do.

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The day I adopted my dog I learned a brutal and immediate lesson about myself and my daily habits.

Nothing makes you analyze your life like a 60 pound furbeast jumping on your face at 6 in the morning immediately after she decided to redecorate your living room with your most recent bulk toilet paper purchase from Costco. (The good stuff, might I add).

The first week of having this dog was hell.

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Workflows are the building blocks of your business.

Whatever business you’re in, workflows are your business.

They act as representations of your whole operation. They can be used to smash inefficiencies and increase profits.

…But what are workflows, and why do they really matter?

Why should they be documented, and how can Process Street help you optimize them?

Let’s find out.

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Podcasts are an awesome way to passively expand your knowledge, especially while you’re walking, in the car, on the train, or doing work that doesn’t require a ton of mental energy.

At Process Street, we’ve compiled a list of podcasts that we personally listen to and would recommend to anyone interested in business, entrepreneurship, marketing, and startups.

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Introducing new policies to ensure a safe and productive workplace makes sense on all sides.

Unfortunately, if your employees don’t know about your policies, it won’t do a damn thing to solve your company’s problems. In other words, if your employee handbook doesn’t get read, you’re fresh out of luck.

There are two ways to all but guarantee your employees will never read your employee handbook.

• Use a cut-and-paste employee handbook template
• Never write one in the first place

Think of the copy-and-paste template as the cookie cutter cold emails we all love to hate – there’s no feeling of a person behind it, so we tune out, ignore it, and get on with our day.

Unlike cold emails, however, if your employees ignore your handbook they’re inevitably going to fall victim to a rule they didn’t know about.

Sure, you’re still covered for the aftermath (as long as it was in the handbook to begin with), but if you want to prevent these costly blunders from happening your employee handbook needs to be interesting and engaging.

After all, wouldn’t you rather read a document that talks to you as a person, rather than another cog in some merciless corporate machine?

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From September 1st 2015 to June 23rd 2016 the polls were clear that Britain would vote to remain in the EU.

According to the Financial Times, there were only two weeks over that period where the Leave campaign were ahead.

Yet, when the results came through, British voters had opted to leave the EU with 51.9% voting out.

How did the leave campaign strategy overcome the clear gap held for the year leading up to the vote?

A clear narrative and a range of big promises?

Well, yes. But also by selling those narratives and promises through a slick targeted marketing campaign powered by social media and big data.

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