Recently updated on January 24th, 2023
Whether you’re working from home, back in the office, or something in between, work looks different than it did just a few years ago. Organizations have accepted that the way we work has shifted and is not reverting to old paradigms. Now it’s about adjusting to the Future Of Work.
One of the most important things to consider while adapting to the ‘new normal’ is the way teams interact with each other in meetings. This article discusses 5 ways to improve your team meetings through the use of meeting assistants that leverage AI.
Don’t make everyone attend every meeting
Have you ever sat silently in a team meeting, itching to get back to the long list of tasks you have to finish by the end of the day?
What about being triple-booked for meetings? This is another common dilemma in today’s remote and hybrid meeting landscape.
Companies are aware of these challenges, but have done little to impact the increasing number of team meetings and increased number of participants.
When you’re sitting in on too many meetings, it’s hard to find time to focus on high-value tasks (dev sprints, product maintenance, customer interactions, and more.) You hired people because of the value they can add to your organization; it’s crucial to give them as much time as possible to do so.
Organizations that leverage meeting technologies like Sembly AI can alleviate this concern. AI will generate meeting minutes and allow you to track follow-up tasks, enabling employees to determine which meetings they need to physically attend. No more missing family dinner for calls with your colleagues or having to attend meeting in the middle of the night scheduled in different time zones.
Reduce distractions so attendees can be fully engaged
Note-taking is one of the biggest distractions associated with remote and hybrid meetings. Here are three ways in which this happens:
- The note-taker can’t fully engage during the meeting if their primary purpose is to take notes.
- Note-takers are subjective and will write down the things most important to their individual work.
- We don’t have the time to read through notes and/or watch a recording.
A lot of transcription technologies exist, but having a meeting recording and transcription usually means that no one will go back through the tedious task of listening or reading it. That’s why transcription is just the beginning for Sembly. We’re also able to identify who said what and let our AI engine provide a glance view of the meeting, enabling quick review of the topics discussed.
The results are team meetings in which everyone can fully engage and worry about the notes afterwards.
Implement post-meeting dialogue
Team meetings need to live and breathe – they can’t just end because the calendar says so.
It’s absolutely vital for organizations to implement post-meeting dialogue. This means leveraging technology that allows you to share snippets from calls, assign tasks to different members of your team, and search topics to see which meetings they came up in.
By searching a term to find the exact meetings in which it was used, you’re recovering data that would have otherwise been lost. Gone are the days of Slacking a colleague to ask if they remember something your boss said in a call last month.
Provide insights to leadership
Simply put, there needs to be a better way for executives to understand what different teams are doing at any given time.
By integrating technologies like Sembly AI into business intelligence tools, leaders can visualize team progress towards goals over a series of meetings, as well as positive/negative sentiment around a particular campaign, issue or project.
Combining post-meeting dialogue with leadership insights enables operational agility. Individuals can stay on top of action items and notes from each call, while leaders can quickly review meeting programs as part of an effective decision-making process.
Treat AI as an extension of your team
Imagine you had a full-time employee whose job was to transcribe team meetings, create summaries, assign action items to different attendees, and provide insights to leadership on how meetings are helping the company achieve goals.
With Sembly and other AI technologies, you don’t have to imagine anymore. When you treat AI as an extension of your team, amazing things can happen. We’ve seen reduced meeting length, increased engagement from each attendee, and an upward trend in positive sentiment.
We’re in the midst of a paradigm shift. The way organizations conduct meetings is changing and we’re excited to keep discovering new ways that AI can help organizations adjust.