I am not a detail person. I am a big picture person. But over the years I have learnt the importance of detail and preparation to deliver high quality output.
In particular, I realised that our past meetings were very poorly managed. Like many companies, we would call a meeting to discuss a particular subject - that subject would be the title of the meeting in the calendar, we'd invite people who would contribute and we would all spend an hour talking having our say.
I cringe when I think how much time was wasted and how inefficient our meetings were in the past. That all changed at the beginning of 2021 after I read Rocket Fuel and became familiar with EOS (Entrepreneur Operating System) - a collection of common sense tools which when combined would make us far more effective as a business.
The tools we use to run meetings effectively are:
Hypercontext and Fellow - Agendas and meeting notes
An absolutely critical tool we used to help manage our meetings is Hypercontext. This tool helped to create an agenda and is used by participants throughout a meeting to make notes and set next steps.
It also keeps a copy of all previous meeting notes (useful for recurring 121s for example) and their Google Chrome App means we never need to leave the meeting window and can take actions directly within meeting.
At the time of writing we are evaluating Fellow which appears to be an even better tool for this task - though it also appears to require more investment to configure and make the most of - both of these tools should be evaluated by anyone who wants higher quality output from their meetings.
Loom / Google Meet recordings
Because we are a fully remote business, most of our meetings are online rather than in person which means we can record them and make them available for others to review.
If some people are unable to attend a meeting, they can watch the meeting later. We have used Loom previously to make recordings, though now through Google Workspace we are able to record meetings natively, then upload the recording to the appropriate Slack channel.
Otter - Automatic audio transcription
To help us record clear notes, we will often use Otter to join a meeting and automatically record audio then transcribe that audio into a document. This transcription is often very accurate, though will usually require an attendee to review afterwards to check for obvious errors in the transcription process.
These transcriptions can then be summarised and added along with the Hypercontext or Fellow notes into the appropriate Slack channel. In the future, I believe this kind of tool will be very useful to report on sentiment analysis and contribution to meetings (who is saying too much and dominating a meeting, who is saying very little and may need support). In my opinion, there's very little downside to these kind of tools.
I'll share more commercial tools that make us VenntroOS - our technology stack - in our next blog.
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