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Originally Posted On: Meeting AI is Saving Companies Big Money – What Could It Do For You? (bulletintech.com)
More and more businesses are using Artificial Intelligence software to successfully drive previously tedious parts of their operations. Why should employees be wasting valuable time in unorganized meetings, preparing inadequately for said meetings and leaving meetings feeling unsatisfied? Meeting software could be the answer to your company’s meeting woes and it could save you more than you think.
Matt Mead knew the way his company did meetings had to change. As the Business Operations Director at The Middlesex Corporation, a Boston-based construction company, he “said outright that it was a waste of company money to have meetings with no agenda or just for giving status updates.”
Since then, The Middlesex Corporation has successfully implemented Decisions – a meeting software solution – but his grievances with unorganized, pointless meetings are shared by millions of workers worldwide. And Mead hit on a key point that’s sometimes overlooked when employees gripe about meandering meetings: these meetings could be costing your company big money.
The High Cost of Wasteful Meetings
According to research, some $399 billion was lost by enterprises in 2019 due to pointless meetings and workers say that, on average, 25% of time in meetings is wasted. Furthermore, some 34% of American workers think that unnecessary meetings are the biggest costs to their companies.
When examining the money lost, it is a bit more complex than an unproductive meeting equaling lost wages for just the duration of the meeting. A bad or frustrating meeting can leave employees stressed or frustrated, interrupt their workflow and too many poor meetings can even foster a less-than-ideal culture. All of this can hurt your bottom line and keep your team members from breakthrough, innovative work.
How to Have Great and Cost-Effective Meetings
Fortunately for companies, the answer is simple: structure and standardization. Unfortunately, however, determining what structure and standardization looks like for your organization can be daunting. Who’s taking the meeting notes and sending them out? Is that taking time from a valuable employee who could be using their resources elsewhere? Are action steps being assigned and followed-up on after the meetings?
What to Look for In Meeting Management Software
Welcome to the world of meeting AI. More and more companies are turning to software solutions to help them effectively prepare and run their meetings. But what should you look for in meeting management software to get the most bang for your buck?
Agenda Building
In a recent study conducted by Gartner, a leading research and advisory company, it is suggested that 63 percent of meetings do not have an agenda and more than 30% of respondents told Gartner that the lack of agenda is one of the top reasons meetings are unsuccessful.
Agendas give meetings an anchor. Creating a standardized template for meetings will help attendees prepare and stay on time. It can give a list of presenters so attendees know who’s talking, and if they are presenting, when and for how long they will be speaking. This can greatly reduce anxiety for presenters. Furthermore, a common agenda format helps ensure all meetings are run in a similar fashion, eliminating the stress that comes with “mystery” or last-minute meetings.
When seeking out meeting management software, the first feature you should look for is the solution’s Agenda-building capabilities. Building agendas should be easy and intuitive with meeting software.
Decisions revolutionary meeting management software has easy agenda building capabilities – including templates – to make your meeting preparation as easy as possible. You can share the agenda to other attendees ahead of time so they can upload relevant documents right into the agenda. To ensure the meeting goes smoothly and stays on track, you can assign each discussion item to a specific presenter and allot a certain amount of time. Decisions will monitor time elapsed for each item with our innovative time tracker tool. Additionally, you can easily track meeting RSVPs with Decisions so you always know who’s coming.
All of this will take the time and energy out of employees manually prepping and wrangling meeting attendees, thus saving costs on labor and saving your team headaches.
Automate Meeting Minutes
A good meeting AI solution will allow all attendees to record notes that will then be automatically added to the meeting minutes and ultimately the overall meeting report. Additionally, great meeting software will be able to digitally assign tasks to participants as discussed within the meeting so everyone leaves the meeting on the same page.
Each decision and task should be recorded in the meeting minutes that can be downloaded into a convenient PDF after the meeting so everyone has a record and a roadmap of next steps and assignments. This automation will not only allow all attendees to review what was discussed, but also have a roadmap of next steps and assignments.
All of these functionalities are built into the Decisions suite.
Other Functions To Look For
There is a plethora of other great functions your company should look for when adopting a meeting management solution. For example, does your business conduct many board meetings? Then perhaps a voting mechanism, like the one Decisions offers, built into agenda items may be useful.
What about managing large meetings? The more participants in your meeting, the harder it is to ensure that everyone gets their chance to speak — without speaking over each other. Using Decisions as a meeting management solution, you can create an ordered speaker list, give participants the option to respond to the current speaker as well as request a brief recess.
Additionally, the follow-up element is extremely important for companies who use meeting software solutions. It’s important to know tasks and assignments discussed in meetings are progressing.
With Decisions meeting software, after the meeting occurs, teams can easily access pending tasks, and the task owner receives an alert that tasks are due. Each task and decision record includes a link to the related agenda and meeting minutes, providing participants with the context they need to complete action items.
Imagine how much time and money all of these features could be saving your organization right now.
But Isn’t New Software Hard to Implement?
Matt Mead at The Middlesex Corporation didn’t think so. At least not when it comes to Decisions.
“Adoption of new technology is always a challenge,” says Mead, whose purview at the company includes IT and new software platforms. “That is not the case with Decisions. We receive so little pushback because it is intuitive and integrates right into the Teams and 365 experience.”
Try Decisions For Free
To book a demo or download a free trial of Decisions meeting management software, visit us here. Start saving money on your meetings today.