7 Tech-Based Solutions to Make Your Meetings More Productive

Stop wasting time in meetings! Learn how to make your meetings more productive with these 7 tech solutions.

7 Tech-Based Solutions to Make Your Meetings More Productive

Too often, businesses waste their time in meetings without purpose or a dedicated agenda, where leaders spend too much time on long-winded speeches, and employees have no idea how they can formulate their own needs or concerns.

In the era of the pandemic, this issue has only amplified. Working remotely or in a hybrid business environment, employers have come across so many communication setbacks that it’s only natural to have meetings with little to no impact.

That is no reason to sit back and let your meetings become just another timewaster on your calendar. Much like in so many other aspects of running your organization, utilizing advanced technology can be helpful in making your meetings more purpose-driven, focused, and efficient. Tech can help your employees get more control over their time and responsibilities, while the same tools can grant your organization more visibility over your overall workload and meeting-specific issues. 

Here, we’ll cover a number of essential tech-driven solutions for businesses of all shapes and sizes that are designed to make your meetings more efficient, productive, and purposeful. 

Use your cloud tech for sharing your agenda

So far, cloud technology has revolutionized how we conduct business, share ideas, protect data security, and enable remote collaboration. Business leaders often forget that such an intricate system can be used for incredibly simple tasks, like setting an agenda for your virtual conference. 

You can easily set up a Google Doc with listed topics and timelines for your meetings, share it with everyone, and give editing rights to employees whose input you’d like to make your calls more efficient. 

Set up a feedback loop

Even if you’re in charge of meetings themselves, you cannot expect your employees to always be satisfied with the meetings’ outcomes. That said, a simple way to boost your business, productivity, and efficiency is to enable open communication with your staff.

Tools like Officevibe can help you set up regular employee surveys to understand the levels of engagement among your teams and spot opportunities for improvement. This is an approach that needs to be implemented regularly to take effect, so it’s necessary to continuously survey your employees on the quality of meetings in order to learn and adapt. 

Upgrade your meeting room with tech

Aside from the simplest possible solutions already at your disposal, it’s time to consider upgrading your hardware and the entire tech setup at the office for hybrid meetings. Why? Because every team member, remote or on-site deserves the same immersive experience for every meeting. 

Integrating high-quality meeting room solutions that include top-notch screens, sound systems, and good monitoring can help take your meetings to the next level. You can use such advanced technology when you’re pitching a new potential client, or for your regular Monday morning calls to start off the week right. Access to a stable digital meeting environment is the foundation for meeting productivity. 

Use digital tools for taking notes

Some people still love the sensation of taking notes in their notebooks, noting ideas down with nothing more than pen and paper. Others, however, have adjusted to the digital world completely and they prefer digital note-taking tools.

Whether you assign tablets to your employees, or you start using a note-taking tool, you should make sure that everyone has clear takeaways from each meeting, and the ability to take notes easily. 

Brainstorming with the right tech

Some businesses, especially the ones that work in an open-concept office to enable better collaboration, love to use whiteboards and similarly simple on-site tools to exchange ideas. What happens with such idea exchanges and creativity when some of your creative workers go home? 

Once again, you can allow your smaller, creative teams and groups to organize their very own meetings and use brainstorming-friendly tools like Lucidchart or even something that you’re already using, like Google Docs. Real-time collaboration makes dedicated meetings more productive, and setting a timeframe can help people stay on track with their daily to-dos.

Automate meetings with a calendar

Companies use AI and other advanced technologies in order to automate many different organizational processes. Sometimes, you expect that only the most intricate, advanced tech solutions can give you the best advantage in organizing your meetings, too, but the truth could be far simpler. In fact, some of the simplest solutions can help you improve your efficiency in meetings today.

Some tools like Asana can serve both as a calendar and a project management tool, while automated software like Calendly can help you schedule meetings with ease for your team. No matter where people are, they can access your calendar and book a time when you’re available, thus avoiding long email exchanges that ultimately waste everyone’s time. 

Analyze and improve your meetings 

If your marketers, sales experts, and your cloud engineers value data, why shouldn’t you, in the role of a meeting coordinator and a business leader? Everything can be better when you’re willing to learn. With the right analytics tools integrated with your conferencing software, you can spot patterns that could be derailing your meeting productivity.

Maybe some meetings run longer when you’re dealing with specific topics, when you fail to outline a time-limited agenda, or when you fail to coordinate the meeting properly – all worthy lessons to pick up for future reference. See who among your employees contributes the most and why, and you can entice others to share their views, too, thus giving them room to express their ideas. 

 

Instead of being a drain on your schedule, your meetings can be data-driven and useful for all of the participants. You’re already using some of the tech options listed here, it’s now up to you to implement such solutions to serve your meetings, as well as they serve all other processes like project management or marketing. 

Keep learning from your employees, too, and you’ll also discover a slew of ways to improve your meeting productivity on the go, based on what your team has to say.