The Digital Meeting Experience Lifecycle
Better meetings don't occur from the time slot allocated for the call. Better meetings and overall company culture are created by improving how we handle meetings at each stage of the Meeting Lifecycle : Before, During and After.
When investigating what makes on online digital meeting experience so frustrating and tiring, we've ended up breaking it down into three main online lifecycle stage. Subsequently we also realised that many of those stages apply to both physical in-office meetings as well as virtual meetings. What our experience has showed us, is that nobody hates meetings per se. There are just too many friction points, at various stages of the meeting experience, which cause a compound dislike of meetings.
Nobody hates meetings, we are just frustrated at the various friction points which makes planning, attending and catching up on meetings incredibly tedious.
In this article, we are breaking down the three stages and how they may impact your company. Each stage plays an important role in the ability to progress through the Remote and Hybrid Work Maturity Index Levels
Before Meeting
This is anything that happens before a meeting. The further along you are on the maturity index, the better your meetings become.
For some companies, there is a deluge of emails discussing tentative times, even for the simplest meetings.
Others use calendar-helpers which makes the scheduling process simple. The lack of agenda, inability to share files, ask questions and prepare remains.
Those are all small friction points which contribute to making the digital meeting experience tedious. Once addressed, they make the calls more efficient, and reduce the amount of time we spend on calls.
Isn't this a dance we are all too common with? We don't like it, so we asked ourselves: "How to better prepare for meetings?". Without proper solutions available, we decided to build it. A way to schedule, create a collaborative agenda, prepare and share files before the meeting.
It's pretty simple, you link your calendar, you create a new "meeting", invite whoever you want to talk to, and set a description. If you have preparation files for your meetings, add them.
The invitee can change the time since it's linked to your calendar. They always book an available time. On top of that, they have immediate access to the files and can ask for clarifications or comments before the meeting starts.
Once the meeting starts, everyone can take private notes. Once the meeting is over, the same green room page turns into a summary of the call. All your previous comments, notes and discussions become searchable and shareable.
During Meeting
This is related to anything that happens "During" a meeting. We've seen a thrilling set of new technologies which attempt to make the during-meeting experience better. For example mmhmm transforms your meeting into a show.
Another small friction point we've addressed is the one of taking notes during a meeting. More specifically, the friction point of not being able to find notes after a meeting has happened.
Time and time again we found ourselves trawling through notebooks to try and figure out what the notes were for a certain meeting. We've addressed this.
During a meeting use Clearword to take quick-fire, timestamped notes. Notes will then be organized in relation to the timeline of the meeting so you can get the exact context in relation to the note. Be more present while keeping all the details.
After Meeting
This is a big one. If you think about meetings, more specifically when a meeting ends. There's a strange phenomenon from the moment the meeting host ends the call. Your brain flushes all the new information out and jumps on another meeting.
Some team members have a few sparse notes, sometimes recordings, sometimes transcriptions. Some store their recordings in Confluence, others store the meeting minutes in Notion. Others simply don't consider the other people in the company, or they expect them to rewatch videos. Spoiler alert: Nobody rewatches the virtual meetings.
As companies become more mature with hybrid-work, they provide communication tools to their leaders, and their teams to be more included.
An inclusive company with better meeting hygiene will share their meetings. They even share transcriptions across their company so people can visually connect with people, and search for skills, or information that might help them in their job.
We know almost nobody watches virtual meeting recordings. We also strongly believe that transcriptions are nothing more than another layer of noise. Realizations like these are why we built Clearword, and why it is so different.
At Clearword, our goal is to make 30 minutes of meetings consumable in 30 seconds. We strive to achieve this by segmenting your virtual meetings automatically (turning it into chapters). Then we summarize each chapter, akin to an automated meeting summary or automated meeting minutes. Finally we allow you to search through comments, notes, and anything that was said, just like you would search on Google. This way, you have a perfect recall of those little details that escaped you.
