His Tool Helps 95% of Fortune 500 Companies Have Highly Productive Meetings. These Are the Two Things He Says Goes Wrong In Most Meetings. CEO Johnny Warström has advised companies like Bosch, Deloitte and many more. Here's what he's taught them about having meetings that matter, and how to increase employee engagement and effectiveness.

Ten years ago, Johnny Warström and his cofounder Niklas Ingvar got sick of sitting through meetings where no one felt comfortable actually saying what they thought, and leaders didn't seem all that interested in hearing what their employees had to say.

So they created a meeting engagement tool called Mentimeter, which is now used by 280 million people worldwide, counts 95% of the Fortune 500 as paying customers, and is valued at $250 million. But for the first decade of the company's existence, Warström says they could barely get any funding.

Potential investors weren't interested because they didn't see what problem the product solved, according to Warström.

"We had a really big struggle selling investors on this societal shift toward the 'listening leader,' and the era of engagement," Warström says. "We said that in the future, leaders will move away from this one-sided way of communicating. They will become a two-sided leader, both listening and talking."

Related: 9 Strategies to Help Your Employees Find Their Purpose (Or Watch Them Leave)

Ironically, the investors wouldn't listen. But finally — they are. Last year Mentimeter raised $42 million to support its expansion. Here, Warström talks about what Mentimeter's data shows about the key aspects of truly engaging, productive meetings.

What are the origins of the Mentimeter concept?

Mentimeter, or Menti, the cute nickname we say, came from realizing that the human need to be listened to and engaged with is everywhere in our society — except in business meetings and presentations.

That's almost like the last place where people do not engage or listen to others. We saw this ourselves. We were those business people who sat through many unengaging and unproductive meetings. So Menti became the tool that we built and brought to work, both when we led meetings and when we sat in them. I gave it to my manager at the time so he could lead better meetings and town halls, et cetera. And this was 10 years ago, in 2012.

Can you explain a bit about Mentimeter's product itself?

We have a platform where a leader can engage participants in a very seamless way. So the participants only need their mobile phones, and then the leader of that meeting or presentation can ask questions anonymously. They can be ranking questions. They can be Q&A, so participants send in open-ended answers. There are diverse forms of engagement depending on the situation that you're in.

Related: This Overlooked Leadership Trait Makes All the Difference in Your Ability to Captivate an Audience

So the product is a very, very simple web-based tool. You don't need any hardware, and the basic service is free. And then we offer more advanced enterprise product features and services, and that's where we make our money. The vast majority of the Fortune 500 companies are our customers, meaning that they see a value beyond the simple, once-in-a-while kind of engagement. It's a core business tool for them.

Can you talk about what commonly happens in meetings that stops them from being productive?

I'd like to point out two very important elements. One is that we still live in a business society where there's not real diversity in the voices being heard. For example, people from a non-standard educational background, or the minority gender. We did a survey that showed that 68% of women preferred an anonymous tool to share their opinion before a discussion.

Meaning that before they show their opinion and discuss it, they also want to know what other people think. With that knowledge as a background, they feel prepared going into the meeting, and you as a leader can kickstart a more diverse discussion. In the end, I think in many cases conversations need to be human to human, but the anonymity of the tool really helps to ignite discussion.

And then, the second element is that a lot of people connect unproductive meetings with the result or outcome of the meeting. If their voices haven't been heard, and if they didn't participate in or commit to the decision made in the meeting, the implementation will not be as effective — compared to if people were engaged. And as a leader, you want to have a committed group of people executing the decisions taken, so everyone needs to be committed before a decision is made.

So you're saying that making sure everyone is engaged in the meeting will impact how successfully decisions made in the meeting are carried out.

Yes, because a meeting doesn't happen in a vacuum. It really has three parts. There is before the meeting, during the meeting, and after the meeting. It's part of a process intended to move a business forward. Before the meeting, as a leader, you should be thinking, 'Am I prepped? Is the purpose clear? Are the right people in the room?' And then during the meeting, you're asking, 'Have I gotten commitment from the people here about what we're about to do after the meeting?' Because the purpose of the meeting is to make something happen.

A lot of what you're talking about sounds like consensus-building. Do you think that, generally speaking, businesses should be run by consensus?

I don't think companies should be run like a democracy. There are definitely people who have more responsibility than others, and at some points in business development, consensus can be bad for companies. But there's also an old way of looking at managers as the people who know everything, are the masters of organizational development, and understand what the company needs at any given point. That is a legacy that doesn't work anymore. The most useful knowledge often comes from those closest to the problems or opportunity of a company, and that is often the way out of an obstacle for the organization.

So for a senior leader to be good at leadership, their decisions need to be enriched by the voices of their colleagues, the voices of their customers, etc. You build that knowledge as a leader through engagement. And the interesting thing here is that it doesn't really matter where you are, or what culture you come from.

Related: How do You Turn Employees Into Problem-Solvers? Follow This 3-Step Leadership Formula.

For example, we are a Swedish company. Our headquarters are in Stockholm. And early on into the company, we thought this would be primarily a Swedish tool because of that point of consensus. Culturally, Swedes are a bit like, yeah, there should be consensus. It can take quite a long time to come to the decision point, but then everyone is aligned, and it is efficient afterwards.

But really early on, back in 2014, North America became our biggest market. Last year we grew, with 85% of our revenue in the North American market. So I don't think it really matters what business culture you have or where on the consensus, non-consensus scale you are. I think that as a leader, you become a much more efficient and effective leader if you listen to customers and colleagues.

I know you work with a lot of very big companies. Is a tool like this also useful for smaller companies?

An interesting data point is that the average number of participants in a Menti meeting is 17. There are a lot of use cases where eight or 10 people in a room use Menti. And it often comes down to this element of being anonymous. If you as a leader are brave or mature enough to have the icebreaker or the first question or two be totally anonymous, even with just 10 people, you will have a much more enriched discussion with more voices. It won't just be the loudest person in the room speaking.

I would imagine this tool is also useful for engaging remote workers.

An interesting thing that's happened in the last couple of years is the hybrid gap between people physically in the room and people who are remote. Hybrid is creating a new risk of voices not being heard equally. So people who are in the room can look people in the eye, raise their hand, or interrupt. So the voices of those in the room are more likely to be heard than those who call in on Zoom or Teams. So there need to be tools that equal those voices, preferably used at the start or in going into the meeting, before the discussion begins. Then you have a much better chance of making the collective intelligence or the whole group count.