7–15%
of payroll goes on meetings
With little test of whether that spend returns anything.
Rogelberg et al., via SHRM
For organisations that run on meetings
Stop paying the coordination tax.
Standups that could be a page. Syncs with no stated outcome. Catch-up calls for everyone who wasn’t there. Pyris removes the meetings that don’t need to happen, shortens the ones that do, and keeps a record so nobody asks twice.
Tuesday 30 September
Your day
09:00Platform daily
Async today · 6 of 7 in
14:00Rollout planning
Agenda ready · 3 outcomes
The rollout date is chosen, and one person owns it
Support knows what changes for customers
Risks reviewed, sent as pre-work
16:00Vendor sync
No agenda yet
Day ahead
2 h 15 min in meetings of 8 h 30 min
- Longest free stretch: 10:30 – 14:00
- Standup went async: 15 min back for 7 people
- 1 meeting still without an agenda · Prepare
Transcribed on the device · No audio stored · Text stays in your tenancy · Entra sign-in
The tax
No one signs off on it. Everyone pays it.
Nobody approves a coordination budget. It accrues one invite at a time: a standing meeting that outlived its reason, a sync with no stated outcome, a catch-up because the notes never arrived, a decision made twice because nobody wrote down who owns it. It shows up as a full calendar and a slow quarter.
One team, one week
Daily standup × 5Status read aloud that could be read
Write itPlanning syncNobody named what it was for
Name the outcomeCatch-up callsRe-telling it to whoever missed it
Brief for meThe same decision, againLast month’s call, re-opened
Decision logWhat’s left is the meeting that needed a room.
22 min
for a 15-minute standup
And the stop-start around it cost more than the meeting itself.
Stray et al., IEEE Software, 2020
62%
arrive unsure of the aim
And 54% often leave without a next step or an owner, so it gets held again.
Atlassian, 2024
30%
of meetings could be skipped
If people trusted they’d be kept in the loop. Attendance is insurance.
Rogelberg for Otter.ai, 2022
Public research on knowledge workers, not Pyris customer results. Pyris doesn’t promise these numbers as savings. It measures yours.
How it works
Pyris cuts the tax at three points.
Not another place to keep notes. A discipline applied before the invite goes out, on the morning of every standing meeting, and after the room empties.
1 · Before the invite
Name the outcome, or don’t book the room.
Pyris asks what must be true when the hour ends. “Discuss the rollout” is an activity. “The rollout date is chosen and one person owns it” is an outcome. While you plan, the last meeting’s summary and open actions sit beside you.
For each outcome, Pyris suggests live or async. Async ones become pre-work, and Pyris drafts the email. The meeting that remains is shorter because the writing already happened.
Cuts meetings with no point, and the time spent finding one.
Live or async
The rollout date is chosen, and one person owns itNeeds a trade-off made together
LiveAsync
Support knows what changes for customersQuestions likely; worth hearing live
LiveAsync
Risks list reviewedReading, not discussion: do it beforehand
LiveAsync
Pre-work email draftedTo 4 attendees · due Wednesday · 1 task, 1 attachment
2 · The morning of
Every standing meeting has to earn today.
On the morning of a recurring meeting, its owner gets one question: is a meeting a good use of time today? Meet, go async, or cancel. No answer, and the meeting goes ahead. Silence is never a cancellation.
Async turns the occurrence into a status report: everyone’s own words, blockers, cross-dependencies, and who hasn’t answered. Guests from outside the company reply from a personal link, without signing in.
Cuts status meetings that exist because they existed last week.
Pyris
Is a meeting a good use of time today?
Async: seven people keep the fifteen minutes. The report lists blockers and who hasn’t answered.
No answer by 09:00 and the meeting goes ahead.
3 · After the room
Make catching up cheaper than attending.
The room gets a note that sets each stated outcome against the record. The boxes start unchecked; only a person’s tick confirms one.
Anyone who stayed away opens a brief written for their role: the headline, the decisions that touch them, their actions, and whether it was safe to skip. People decline with confidence once they trust the brief will arrive.
Cuts attendance as insurance, and the catch-up call afterwards.
Brief for me
Rollout moves to 14 October. Your budget sign-off is needed by Friday.
Decisions that touch you
ConfirmedLaunch date set; one owner named in Product
ConfirmedContractor spend capped at this quarter’s line
Your actions
Confirm the revised forecastDue Friday
Safe to have skipped— nothing needed you in the room
Decision log
Decide once. Stop re-deciding.
The most expensive meeting is the one that re-opens a decision nobody can find.
Confirmed decisions leave the meeting note and enter the organisation’s decision log: what was decided, why, the alternatives, who made it, and the one person accountable. Each is scoped to the meeting, the team, or the whole organisation.
When minds change, a decision is superseded, not overwritten. It stays in the log, linked to what replaced it. The next person to ask gets an answer, not another meeting.
Confirmed · 3 days agoScope: Team
Ship the rollout on 14 October, behind a staged flag.
- Why
- Support needs a week of lead time; the flag limits exposure.
- Considered
- 30 September, full launch
- Made by
- Rollout planning · 4 people
- Accountable
- Head of Product
Supersedes an earlier launch dateEarlier decision kept in the log
Metrics
Put a number on your own tax.
Pyris keeps your organisation’s own counts, meeting by meeting, instead of borrowing someone else’s percentages. When the sample is too small, it says there isn’t enough data yet.
Preparing
Active time on the agenda before the hour.
The hour
How long it ran, against the time booked.
Writing up
Time on the note, not waiting for the draft.
The room
Who was needed, asked of the people invited.
Outcome hit rate
Hit
Partial
Missed
Unscored
Security
Lower tax. No new exposure.
Transcription happens on the device. Audio is held in memory for that work. It’s never written to disk or uploaded.
Only text reaches the organisation. People sign in with Entra, the draft is written in your own cloud, and transcript text is purged after 30 days. The note stays because a person reviewed it. The model never approves its own sentences.
- Stops here
Audio
Captured for the meeting. Processed in memory on the device.
- Purged after 30 days
Text
The transcript, segment by segment. Nothing else from the recording.
- Draft
Draft
Written in your cloud tenancy, in the shape chosen before the hour.
- Reviewed
Sign-off
A person’s acknowledgement that they inspected it. Edits never create one.
Who it’s for
Who stops paying.
The people invited
See the outcome before you accept. Stay away and still open a brief written for your role. When the morning question turns a standup into a page, the time you get back is yours.
The people who call meetings
Name the outcome before the invite goes wide. Move what you can into pre-work. Ask each morning whether the room is needed. Afterwards, see which outcomes were hit and which decisions entered the log.
The people who run the organisation
The payroll already spent on rooms becomes something you can see, meeting by meeting, instead of a feeling that every week is full. Decisions have an owner and a scope. Audio never rests on a disk.
Your next standup can be a page.
Start with one team and one standing meeting. The counts are yours from the first occurrence: which ones needed a room, which outcomes were hit, and what everyone got back.