For many industries, the Coronavirus pandemic accelerated modern ways of working, and the life sciences sector is no exception. Remote work and decentralized operations grew in popularity before COVID-19, but they became overnight operational necessities during the pandemic. As Philip Dana, VP of Human Resources at Dendreon Pharmaceuticals, a California-based pharmaceutical company, explains, "it changed about two-thirds of everybody's jobs immediately."
Of course, not everyone in the life sciences sector worked remotely. Some staff, like lab technicians, support staff, and IT personnel, continued working on-site. For many companies, this model is a useful roadmap for the future. A hybrid workforce composed of on-site, remote, and distributed teams represent the present and future of work. That’s why, according to the global management consulting agency McKinsey & Co., digital tools will play a prominent role in healthcare-related communications.
As a result, biotech and pharmaceutical companies will need to optimize their online meetings, capabilities, and talent for this framework, ensuring that their workforce is as adaptive and productive as possible at a critical time. For leaders looking to support hybrid teams, here are four best practices for optimizing communication and collaboration in a digital environment.
Create & Send Meeting Agendas
Today’s workers are inundated with time-consuming meetings that fail to achieve actionable outcomes. Surveying online meeting participants, the 2020 State of Online Meetings Report found that 42% of respondents felt digital gatherings were “seldom or never effective.”
This is a catastrophic use of time and resources. Not only are employees engaged in hours of meetings without benefit, but the ancillary effects, including Zoom fatigue, further erode productivity at a time when the industry desperately needs employees to be productive, effective, and fruitful in their efforts. In response, leaders can make meetings more effective by creating a detailed agenda and sending it out in advance. This practice puts everyone on the same page before the meeting starts while reducing the likelihood that topics will be derailed.
A successful meeting agenda includes two critical items: a purpose statement and a list of desired outcomes.
As the name suggests, the purpose statement clarifies the reason for the meeting. Common purposes include:
- To identify, define, and/or resolve an issue
- To solve a problem or explore an opportunity
- To present an idea and get input
- To inform stakeholders and answer questions
- To develop a proposal or build a plan
- To make a decision and identify next steps
Similarly, desired outcomes are brief, written statements that provide specific, measurable results, including plans, agreements, decisions, and lists. When meetings include purpose statements and objectives outcomes improved significantly, allowing leaders to meet their goals 93% of the time. Effective communication and collaboration are critical as the life science sector continues to fight the pandemic while also addressing evolving demands within the industry.
Get Everyone Engaged
Meetings are not a platform for passive participation. Rather, highly effective meetings engage all attendees, something that is critical for continued excellence in the life science sector. Assessing the future of the life science sector, Arvind Kothandaraman, the general manager of Specialty Diagnostics at PerkinElmer, notes, “Continued improvement in the area of diagnostics and collaboration in the life sciences and lab” will help end today’s pandemic and prevent the next one.
Active engagement allows leaders to hear from team members across divisions and specialties, creating new opportunities for cross-team collaboration and continued innovation. While every leader and meeting comes with unique restrictions, and opportunities, assigning meeting roles can help optimize the process. Common meeting roles include:
- Meeting leader: This person is tasked with setting constraints, deciding who participates, and making final decisions.
- Facilitator: Charged with keeping meetings moving, this person will check for understanding, build agreements, and keep people focused and engaged.
- Scribe: The scribe is responsible for keeping track of information, critical insights, agreements, action items, and tabled topics.
- Participant: These professions are responsible for staying focused, engaged, and contributing ideas and suggestions.
- Tech specialists: In a digital environment, tech specialists can organize meetings, monitor chats, and troubleshoot connectivity issues.
Getting everyone involved helps ensure that meetings are as purposeful and productive as possible.
Reduce Meeting Frequency
According to the Harvard Business Review, meetings have consistently increased in length and frequency over the past 50 years. Today, executives spend 23 hours a week in meetings, an escalation of more than 13 hours since the 1960s.
What’s more, a survey of the pharmaceutical industry found that 88% of the sector’s employees expect the number of meetings to increase or stay the same in the months and years ahead. While companies can’t eliminate meetings altogether, reducing meeting frequency and reevaluating current practices can improve engagement across the board. If there are no topics to cover, don’t meet.
Develop Standards for Accountability
Communication and collaboration have been critical to the life sciences industry in the past year. They’ve yielded the fastest development and deployment of a vaccine in history while also developing life-saving treatments and therapeutics that helped make a bad situation a little bit better.
To continue this trend, everyone needs to be accountable for making meetings matter in the months and years ahead. Therefore, developing and implementing norms and standards of accountability can produce better outcomes for all stakeholders.
Moving forward, everything from an increasingly caustic regulatory environment to shifting patient expectations will require industry employees to collaborate and communicate with excellence, which requires better, more effective meeting strategies. These processes don’t guarantee the next medical breakthrough, but they are foundational elements of the social infrastructure that makes them possible.
Chris Williams is the Director of Business Operations at Interaction Associates.