Less Meetings, More Focus in Life Sciences
At a glance
CLIENT
A European life sciences company
SERVICE
- Organizational change management, Talent Enablement, Agile Ways of Working, CX Strategy & Design, Workforce Experience, Digital Transformation, Engineering
INDUSTRY
- Life Sciences / Biopharma
A European life sciences company was scaling R&D and commercial operations across several countries, but its way of working had not kept up. Teams spent most days in back-to-back meetings, switching between email, legacy document shares, and local chat tools. Hybrid work after the pandemic only added friction: employees complained about unclear expectations, overloaded calendars, and fragmented collaboration.
LeanCoded partnered with the company to redesign how work happened day to day. Over 12 months, we launched a “digital collaboration playbook”, rationalized tools around Microsoft 365 and Teams, introduced a digital adoption platform, and ran a targeted change program. The result: meeting time per employee dropped by 23%, usage of shared digital workspaces grew by 65%, and employee eNPS on “tools and ways of working” improved by 18 points.
When Hybrid Work Becomes a Wall of Meetings
Diagnostics across R&D, quality, and commercial teams showed a consistent pattern: calendars filled from 9:00 to 17:00 with status updates and handoffs that could have been handled asynchronously. On average, knowledge workers spent 19 hours per week in meetings, with 40% of those meetings involving more than eight people. Document collaboration happened via local copies and email attachments, which slowed regulatory documentation and increased the risk of version errors. LeanCoded combined swot analysis of current practices with interviews and data from collaboration tools to identify the specific behaviors that blocked focus and slowed decisions.
At the same time, leadership wanted a measurable way to support hybrid work, not just another slogan. They needed a practical blueprint that managers and teams could adopt without turning into a large “culture project”. LeanCoded designed a change program centered on concrete behaviours: meeting hygiene, channel-based communication, and shared digital workspaces. We used our experience as a software development company delivering enterprise software solution rollouts to align process changes, tooling, and training into one roadmap instead of separate initiatives.
A Playbook, Not Just a New Tool
Rather than “rolling out Teams” and hoping for adoption, LeanCoded built a digital collaboration playbook tailored to life sciences workflows. We mapped common scenarios—regulatory document reviews, study team coordination, launch planning—and specified how each should run in the new model: which channel, which template, which decision points. That playbook became the anchor for training, leadership messages, and local experiments in each function.
On the technical side, we worked with internal IT to standardize around Microsoft 365, Teams, and a small set of approved apps. LeanCoded provided software development services to create lightweight integrations and templates—standard Teams channel structures, meeting agendas, and decision logs—rather than a heavy custom system. A digital adoption platform was layered on top of the collaboration tools to provide in-app guidance, nudges, and walkthroughs, reducing the need for repeated classroom training and making it easier for new joiners to adopt the model from day one.
Evidence-based baseline and targets
Co-design with real teams
Tool rationalization and enablement
Manager and change agent network
Feedback loops and adjustments
How LeanCoded Turned Change into Everyday Habits
The real goal was not a new collaboration suite, but a sustainable shift in how people spent their time. LeanCoded combined organizational change, digital transformation services, and light custom software development to help the company embed new habits without disrupting regulated work.
Clear rules for meetings
Teams adopted simple, visible rules: default 25/50-minute slots, required agendas, and decisions captured in shared channels. Large recurring meetings were cut or redesigned based on data, not opinion.
- Channels over inboxes
Project work moved from fragmented email threads to structured channels and shared workspaces. Standard templates for clinical and commercial processes made work more transparent and easier to onboard into. - Adoption supported in the flow of work
With a digital adoption platform, employees received in-context tips and checklists when they opened Teams or started a document review, reducing the need for extra training sessions. - Leadership walking the talk
Leaders simplified their own calendars, used channels instead of blast emails, and consistently referenced the playbook in town halls and 1:1s, reinforcing the new model with concrete behavior.
Impact on Time, Engagement, and Delivery
Within nine months of launching the playbook and tooling changes, average weekly meeting time per knowledge worker dropped from 19 to 14.6 hours, exceeding the 20% reduction target. The number of recurring meetings with more than eight participants fell by 32%, while the share of documents stored and co-authored in shared workspaces rose from 45% to 74%. Adoption metrics from the digital adoption platform showed that over 80% of active users engaged with at least one guided walkthrough or checklist per month.
Employee surveys reported a tangible shift: eNPS on the question “Our tools and ways of working help me focus on what matters” improved by 18 points, and the “clarity of collaboration norms” score increased by 21 points. Delivery leaders in R&D and commercial reported fewer last-minute escalations about “lost” documents or misaligned expectations. By combining organizational change management with targeted software development services and digital transformation services, LeanCoded helped the company turn flexible work and digital collaboration from a constraint into a competitive advantage.