Five teams, five ways to book a meeting.What’s that costing you?

Tool proliferation has become a huge headache for Ops leaders. In the last two decades, I’ve witnessed first-hand (like I’m sure many of you) the increasing number of apps and tools available to us, competing for our attention and time. Now, adding our favorite LLMs to the mix, it has added another layer of attention-grabbing to get work done.

Sometimes in the past, I have been caught up in trying to use the perfect tool for a particular task or project, when in truth, any could have got the job done. But, there are sometimes some tools that definitely stand out above others. The ‘painkiller’ as opposed to a ‘vitamin’ solution.

But the challenge still remains for an Ops leader where, different teams are using different tools based on their own unique workflows, and many times this can leave the organization exposed to security risks, not to mention overwhelming tool sprawl for the Ops team looking to keep on top of their tool stack. Perhaps the most prominent of them all are ways in which people get meetings booked, or manage their weekly schedule.

If you run operations, you’ve probably watched it happen. Sales signs up for one booking tool, recruiting picks another, customer success pays for a third on a team card, and finance still books everything by email. Each choice made sense for that team on the day it was made.

Below: why teams end up with their own way to book, what it costs when you don’t consolidate scheduling tools, a simple CMI model for one shared way of working, and a self-audit to see where your operation stands.

Because each team fixes its own problem first, and meetings are a problem every team has. Talker Research’s 2025 survey for HP asked knowledge workers to name their biggest drains on time, and 16% named managing calendars and meetings.

So a team lead finds a tool that solves their part of it, buys a few seats and moves on. Nobody’s doing anything wrong. Repeat that across five or six teams and the operation has five or six ways to do the same job.

The strain grows with size. In LeanData’s 2026 survey of 201 marketing and revenue operations leaders at B2B companies with more than 2,500 employees, 47% reported manual processes that cannot scale with growth.

Sources: Talker Research for HP, Workforce Experience Survey, 2025 · LeanData, 2026 B2B State of Martech and Revenue Operations

The licenses are the part finance can see. The rest turns up as friction between teams, and it lands in three places.

Pick a place to see what the research says, what it looks like day to day, and what helps.

In my view, the biggest cost never shows up on an invoice. It’s the time people spend working around each other’s tools.

Sources: Harvard Business Review, How much time and energy do we waste toggling between applications? · Salesforce, State of the Connected Customer · Okta, Businesses at Work 2026

The Chartered Management Institute’s meeting etiquette guide, Do the 3 step, splits every meeting into three steps: Schedule, Attend and Follow up. When every team runs those steps the same way, the operation has one way of working. Pick a step to see what that looks like.

The aim is consistency. A customer, a candidate or a colleague should get the same experience whichever team they’re dealing with.

Source: CMI, Do the 3 step: meeting etiquette

It puts every kind of booking in one place, on rules each person sets once.

1. 1.One “+ Create” menu. Meetings, booking pages, group polls, sign-up sheets, focus time, out-of-office and Find Time all start from the same place, so every team learns one way to book.
2. 2.Works with the calendars you already run. People connect Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple iCloud, so a mixed estate doesn’t need mixed tools.
3. 3.Rules that travel with each person. Meeting hours, buffers and meeting limits apply whichever team is booking.
4. 4.Plans built for a whole operation. The Team plan covers 2 to 100 users with admin controls. Enterprise gives access to every employee, with Flex Seats.

What about teams that love their current tool?

Bring them in early. The CMI’s Four T model of team development looks at Task, Team, Type and Tools, and warns that when a team struggles, the blame often lands on hard factors like tools when the real problem sits with the people and how they’ve agreed to work.

So agree the way of working with your team leads first, then move the tools. A switch the teams helped design is one they’ll stick with.

Source: CMI, Four T Model of Team Development

Tick each statement that’s true for your operation today. You’ll get a score out of 8 and a first step. It’s a quick self-check based on the points above, not a benchmark.

Where do you start?

1. 1.List every booking tool in use. Who owns it, which team uses it and when it renews.
2. 2.Ask each team lead what their tool does for them. Those answers become the requirements for one shared way of booking.
3. 3.Agree the rules once. Meeting hours, buffers and limits for everyone, and one booking page style for anyone outside the company.