4 Hidden Efficiency Boosters You’ll Discover with Software for EOS®

If your company is running on the Entrepreneurial Operating System^®, you’re probably gaining more Traction^® every year. Congratulations! But chances are, there are some hidden opportunities to boost your efficiency that you haven’t even thought about.

Anytime you implement a system manually, you’ll have opportunities to increase efficiency and boost productivity. Traction Tools software for EOS introduces automation that could give you back hundreds of man-hours and thousands of dollars in lost costs.

While Traction Tools is much more than a meeting agenda (it helps with all Six Key Components of your business), the biggest efficiencies are gained in the Level 10 Meeting.  Let’s look at the big-ticket areas for boosting your efficiency, and how Traction Tools can help you be even more productive.

Meeting prep

You’ve got a Level 10 Meeting coming up, and you need to prepare your deliverables. That means updating the Scorecard numbers and adding new People Headlines and Issues. So you pass around a spreadsheet—or three different spreadsheets—to get the items you need. Sounds easy, right? Famous last words, my friend.

Collecting information for Level 10 Meetings means soliciting input from several people and waiting for them to update their part of the document or spreadsheet. Then someone needs to pass the spreadsheet on to the next person, and so forth. In the process, formulas get broken and numbers get entered incorrectly. It takes several days of herding cats to get everyone’s contribution, and by the time you compile it all, who knows if it’s accurate? Either the data is out of date already, or it’s entered wrong, and you never know it.

That’s a lot of work for outdated metrics.

With Traction Tools, you can get the numbers you need quickly and accurately with data that updates in real-time. So your Scorecard works as intended—as a report-out of leading indicators, rather than outdated (and incorrect) trailing indicators. No more cat herding, and no more worrying about incorrect reporting.

Issues are more efficient, too! Traction Tools lets you add Issues as they come up throughout the week via texting or the mobile app. That means less prep work, and more Traction during the meeting — plus, you won’t have to struggle to remember which Issues you wanted to address, because they’re auto-populated in your meeting agenda!

Capturing information

During the Level 10 Meeting, someone needs to record To-Dos and Issues and capture cascading messages. If that information isn’t recorded accurately, you wind up with a bunch of inefficiencies — going back, figuring out the error, making corrections…all time that could’ve been spent gaining Traction. And capturing all that information by hand? Phew. You’re trapped between focusing on the meeting, or focusing on the notes; there’s not really a healthy in-between.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sometimes, you lose notes due to mis-dating a document, or improper organization habits — what then? 

When you write down all your To-Dos in a notebook, you’re reducing accountability. The others in the room forget what you wrote down because your To-Dos are private. And if you lose the notebook, you lose weeks or months of work. It ripples out to other people and departments who depend on your work, and it creates inefficiencies throughout the organization.

But you can avoid all that by capturing information digitally. Typing is faster than handwriting, which makes it easier to capture details while being present in the meeting. Traction Tools goes one step further by allowing collaboration — so multiple people can add notations to the Issues in real-time, without slowing down the meeting. Plus, everyone can access the notes in a centralized location any time they need to refer to them. 

Post-meeting activities

After the Level 10 Meeting, you’ve got follow-up activities to do. You’ll need to compile your notes, transcribe them into a central location and cascade messages out to the team. But as you sit down at your desk, you realize it will have to wait.

You’ve been out for 90 minutes, but the work didn’t stop coming in. There are emails demanding your replies and voicemails that need follow-up. Information from the Level 10 Meeting doesn’t get cascaded out right away, and it might not happen until the next day — there’s just not enough time. As a result, your recipients have lost time to complete their To-Dos. 

Traction Tools fully automates those post-meeting activities, giving you the ability to jump right back into work. All your notes and To-Dos are already in a central location, and a cascading email is sent to everyone who needs to receive it. The email includes all the details you need to communicate:

• Number of Issues solved
• To-Do completion rate
• Average meeting rating
• Meeting length
• Completed To-Dos
• New To-Dos
• Issues solved (including notes)

The software also sends automated reminders of To-Dos that are nearly due or overdue to help keep your people accountable and on-track.

Technology tools

Using certain softwares to implement EOS can certainly make things easier — but you could be doing even more to streamline your EOS. Here’s why.

If you’re trying to take advantage of technology, chances are you’re using multiple tools to capture, manage and report information. You’ve got your To-Dos in Trello, the Scorecard in a spreadsheet and Rocks in a Word document. Maybe you’re also using a project management app like Teamwork. Documents are stored in Google Drive and other online apps.

You’ve done a great job of reducing your handwritten activities, and you’ve probably got some automation going. But you’re spread out among different tools, which means inevitably, you’ll need to duplicate information so that multiple apps have the same content. You’ll also need to do some manual maintenance as you go along.

Because you’re still capturing information in one tool (say, Google Docs), you’ll need to take time to disseminate them into all your other tools after the Level 10 Meeting. Information is bound to slip through the cracks—either it will get entered into the wrong tool, or it won’t get entered at all.

Traction Tools is an all-in-one system that is specifically designed for EOS. That means you don’t have to use wonky workarounds or settle for less-than-ideal workflows. The software fits EOS like a glove because it was built around the way EOS works. So you truly can boost your efficiencies and maximize the way you implement the Entrepreneurial Operating System.

Inefficiencies will cost your company. Traction Tools software for EOS is designed specifically for the flow of the Entrepreneurial Operating System, which means it is uniquely able to boost your efficiencies in ways that other solutions can’t do.

Ready to get going with Traction Tools? We’re here for you! Start your 30-day free trial.