Elly Yates-Roberts |
Meetings are necessary for all organisations, but they are also universally disliked.
They either spark collaboration and creativity or plunge attendees into a deep pool of meeting fatigue – a particularly frustrating and unproductive meeting can aggravate employees into needing lengthy recovery times, cutting into labour costs and stopping great ideas in their tracks.
This is why we created Decisions meeting management software for Microsoft Teams. As cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world.” This is only true if these groups of people are structured enough in their meetings to produce outcomes.
With Decisions, we streamlined the meeting process by giving our clients easy agenda-building capabilities, templates, ways to log tasks and decisions, a Time Tracker, automatic ways to follow-up and more. Our goal? To transform meeting culture so organisations can stop wasting time and money on unproductive meetings.
Despite being a staunch believer in sending Decisions structured agendas out beforehand so attendees can prepare, this process can be lost in the day-to-day flurry of a fast-paced work environment. This is why, when I sent a meeting invite to a newer employee with no description or agenda, I did not think much of it. For her, this caused a full-blown anxiety attack. She didn’t let me in on this until much later, but it made me realise more than ever how important good and consistent meeting culture is. Some 80 per cent of workers will suffer from work-related stress that can affect their job performance, so adding to that in the form of ambiguous meeting invites and objectives is a disservice to both employer and employee.
But agenda-less meetings that cause employees to spiral into a pool of worst-case scenarios can be prevented. More and more organisations are turning to meeting management software to fix problems just like these. Mystery meetings can negatively impact workers’ mindset, cause them to feel unprepared, and snowball into interrupting workflow and decrease the value they bring to the table. A meeting solution software, like Decisions, allows meeting admins to share the meeting agenda beforehand, so employees know what to expect and can attend with a positive mindset that continues even after the meeting concludes. Great meeting culture means a better work environment where everyone feels comfortable, works proactively toward business goals, and morale stays high. For me and my anxious employee? No more mystery meetings. Lesson learned.
Jørgen Solberg is CEO of Decisions
This article was originally published in the Winter 21/22 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.