How Seibert increases productivity 30% by automating meetings and work

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‍Seibert is a specialized software consulting and development group based in Germany, facilitating agile collaboration through a range of software solutions and services for their clients. As official partners of tech leaders like Atlassian and Google Cloud, they offer cutting-edge products and are trusted by enterprise brands BMW, Allianz, Bosch, and Deutsche Bank.

Seibert challenges

The team at Seibert Group is focused on empowering companies with the digital tools they need to stay competitive in today's fast-paced business environment. As Lead Engineer, Julian Felix Rost (Jay) found himself juggling an extremely busy calendar packed with team meetings and client calls, as well as a growing task list he needed to make time for. This led to a constant struggle of trying to strike the right balance during the workweek. 

“My days are spent talking to everyone. From external meetings with customer support and escalation calls, to finding time to connect internally and enable my colleagues – I've got a lot of meeting pressure on my calendar. On top of that, I still need to make time for deep focus work so I can actually address some of the problems that I uncover in my meetings and get them solved.”

Between manually finding time to meet with the internal team and coordinating calls with clients – Jay spent 5-10 hours every week just moving events around on the calendar trying to make it all fit. The mental load of managing conflicts and new urgencies was a challenge for the Seibert team, impacting their productivity and well-being as meetings dominated the week and regularly bled into employees' personal hours.

Jay recognized the need for a tool to optimize how he and the rest of the engineering team at Seibert were managing their time around meetings and tasks, which led to his discovery of Reclaim in 2022.

How Reclaim helps Seibert optimize collaboration & independent productivity

• Keep the international team connected and collaborating with AI meeting scheduling
• Prevent meeting fatigue with regular breaks after meetings
• Create more time for deep work on important tasks

When Jay found Reclaim, he realized the AI app actually automated many of the time management best practices he had been trying to adopt on his own – including time blocking a daily plan, prioritizing tasks, and defending time for regular breaks.

Reclaim is a smart calendar app that helps teams automatically schedule time for their meetings, tasks, habits, and breaks around existing calendar events with AI-powered features.

“Smart Meetings are really, really cool because I can just set them and forget them. And then if there is an issue, it comes back to me. I have meetings configured to stay on my calendar if Reclaim can’t find a time for them. I really like that feature because then I can decide, do I still need that this week? And if we have to reschedule the meeting, I know it’ll be on the calendar at the next best time instead of falling through the cracks.” 

With Seibert managing an international client base and their own team spread across Germany and the US, automating meeting scheduling at the best time across time zones was a huge time win. 

Around their heavy meeting schedule, one of the most popular Reclaim features used by the Seibert team is Decompression Time which automatically defends breaks after meeting events. This practice ensures they avoid back-to-back meetings and allows them to get more value out of their meetings with the time they need to reset, review notes, or update the CRM after calls. 

“I have the decompression time set on many of my meetings, that's also very helpful. People just schedule event after event after event, and then you don't have any time to take a breather or even just to look at your notes and maybe put notes into HubSpot or your CRM, or your ERP. Oftentimes, we don’t plan for that – but Reclaim does.”

By offloading the burden of manually finding time to connect with their team, coordinating times with clients, and auto-scheduling breaks, the Seibert engineering team was able to unlock more hours every week for productive work. They used this extra time to focus on shipping engineering developments faster for their clients and coordinating better as a team.

Time for clients is the number one priority at Seibert. Jay and the team found the best way to ensure they have enough client-facing time every week was to use ‘themes’ to organize and plan their days on a set schedule. They split their time during the week to be available for important meetings and calls, while still reserving time for Tasks to schedule during dedicated ‘deep work’ hours via Reclaim’s Custom Hours.

“I get more opportunities to have focused blocks of time. I can say," This task is going to take at least 2-3 hours so I'm gonna block that time off to work on it." Reclaim schedules it at the best time right in my calendar, and everybody else can see it, too, without me having to actually manually put it there. That way, the task time is actually respected because it's already on the plan for the week, versus me having to fit them into my private life sometimes.”

This ensures Jay and the team have time to complete important tasks, and their team members know when they’re busy so they’re not constantly interrupted. By using AI to plan and defend their time, the Seibert engineering group are able to maximize their productivity, and prevent forced overtime from work spilling into their nights and weekends. And, with advanced priority settings for all their meetings and tasks – the team knows their time is always directed to what’s most important every week.

Seibert results

• Employees auto-schedule an average of 5.4 recurring meetings at the best time for everyone
• Employees get 2.1 more hours/week for top priorities
• 84.6% of employees reduce back-to-back meetings with smart breaks 

Today, Seibert has deployed Reclaim across the engineering and ops teams at the company. With a simple self-serve onboarding process, the Seibert team was able to convert recurring team and one-on-one meetings to auto-schedule at the best time for all attendees and defend time for breaks after meetings. On average, Seibert employees are able to put 5.4 meetings/week on auto-pilot, so they never have to worry about coordinating across time zones and conflicts again.

“With the team members that are on Reclaim, I've noticed that it's starting to be even more intelligent. For example with one colleague, our 1:1 will sometimes be scheduled into weird time slots that I would never have thought of, but it just makes sense because both of us are actually available at that time. I honor my agreements internally a lot better now, like meeting one-on-one consistently.”

And with 84.6% of the Seibert users enabling the Decompression Time break feature – Jay and the team don’t end up sitting through back-to-back meeting days. These auto-scheduled breaks protect the team from meeting fatigue, guarantee time to review notes after meetings, and gives them time to prepare for their next call. 

Besides smart scheduling for Tasks, Jay and the Seibert team also use smart recurring events called Habits to automatically find the best time for their recurring routines. The team sets its own scheduling windows for each Habit, like Morning Catchup or Lunch, so it stays flexible on the calendar and finds the best time around their meetings. With Habits alone, the team is able to defend an additional 2.1 hours/week for their routines – maximizing productivity and protecting work-life balance at the organization. 

By automatically scheduling meetings across time zones, setting breaks after meetings, and defending time for focused work with Tasks and Habits – Reclaim enabled the Seibert team to get more out of their meetings, boost productivity 30%, and foster a more balanced work environment that enhances collaboration with their clients and team.