The CEO of Zuger Kantonalbank saves 6 hours/week on meeting management thanks to Sherpany
Challenge
Meetings lacked structure, agendas lacked clarity, and the administrative burden of meetings on the C-Suite and their assistants was high.
How we help
With Sherpany, the CEO alone saves more than 6 hours per week on meetings, a saving of more than 312 hours per year, and meetings have clarity and structure.
This case study was published in 2019. At the time of publication, Pascal Niquille was the CEO of Zuger Kantonalbank.
Meetings are crucial to ensure an organisation’s success. They help foster relationships, ensure collaboration, enable innovation, and take the right decisions. It does not come as a surprise that meetings are the most frequently used management instrument. Unfortunately, meetings are also a source of frustration. Executives spend an average of 23 hours a week in meetings, which keeps them from completing their own individual work. On top of that, leaders regard many of their meetings as unproductive and even as a waste of their time.1
Thus, how can leaders manage their meetings in an effective way? The first step is to become aware of the challenges around leadership meetings. Pascal Niquille, CEO of Zuger Kantonalbank, estimates that he spends on average between 15 and 20 hours a week in meetings, not including preparation and follow-up work. Fortunately, he looked for ways to exhaust the full potential of meetings. The CEO highlights the importance of productive meeting management: ‘This can be achieved by proper meeting organisation and rules’, says the CEO. In order to run more productive meetings, the top management as well as other leadership teams at Zuger Kantonalbank started to use Sherpany.
The advantages of better structured executive meetings
Sherpany turned out to be the most suitable instrument to solve their challenges regarding meeting management. The software introduced a much clearer structure into the meeting process and led to a better overall organisation of meetings. The agenda of the meetings, for example, became much clearer with Sherpany. Niquille also highlights another fundamental advantage: the meeting solution reduced the administrative load of the C-suite and their administrators - meeting materials are now collected and distributed directly through the platform and updated with a single click.
For Niquille personally, the main benefit of using Sherpany is that he always has all relevant materials with him on his iPad. ‘This gives me the freedom to do my work when and where I want’, says the CEO. By using one single platform to manage all meeting-related activities, the executives at Zuger Kantonalbank are now able to prepare for their meetings even better. They can read meeting documents easily, take notes, access documents from previous meetings, and collaborate with their peers at anytime.
The bank CEO gets at least 312 hours of time back per year
Sherpany had a big impact on the overall work of the C-suite at Zuger Kantonalbank. By using a more structured approach to meetings, reducing administrative work, and preparing better, they accomplished to improve efficiency throughout the entire decision-making process.
I estimate to save at least 6 hours per week on meeting preparation because of using Sherpany.
This testimonial shows that a very particular effect of using Sherpany is that leaders free up time for more value-adding work. In numbers, this means that the CEO of Zuger Kantonalbank, saves at least 312 hours of work throughout a year. This means that a group of C-levels, consisting of five people, can save the equivalent to 195 eight-hour working days per year.
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Challenges of the banking sector: ensuring data security and introducing agility
As a bank, Zuger Kantonalbank has very specific requirements to digital solutions such as Sherpany. In Switzerland, as in many other countries, the financial sector is one of the most strictly regulated industries. At Sherpany, we take compliance and security issues very seriously. Our meeting solution is compliant with GDPR and FINMA regulations, and not affected by the US CLOUD Act. Over 60 European businesses from the banking and financial industry trust Sherpany to protect their sensitive and confidential data.
What is more, CEO Pascal Niquille sees a more agile meeting management as an answer to today’s challenges in the financial sector. ‘Problems become more complex and more interdisciplinary know-how is needed’, says Niquille. A more agile meeting culture could help to better coordinate between different teams. In the complex and fast-changing financial sector, ensuring good decisions and speeding up the decision-making process is a very important success factor for a company. It is up to leaders, such as the CEO, to take the first steps towards a better corporate meeting culture and enhanced leadership efficiency.
Are you facing the same challenges in your company? We can help.
About Zuger Kantonalbank
Zuger Kantonalbank provides retail and corporate banking products to residents of Central Switzerland and employs 450 people. The bank is listed on the Swiss stock exchange and has full state guarantee. Half of the shares are held by the Canton of Zug, the other half by around 10,000 private shareholders.
For this case study, we had the pleasure to speak with the CEO, Pascal Niquille, about the leadership meeting culture at Zuger Kantonalbank. To know more about this bank, visit their website.
1 Leslie A. Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley and, Eunice Eun, “Stop the Meeting Madness”,
Harvard Business Review, 2017.
