How To Improve Your Meeting Recap With The Help Of Hive
According to data from HighFive, over 11 million meetings are held each day – and the average meeting lasts anywhere from 30-60 minutes. Middle managers tend to spend about 35% of their workday in meetings, even if most (73%) only involve two to four people. Meetings are the bane of everyone’s existence, so it seems. But do they have to be?
The best way to flip the script on meetings is by coming at them with not only with a new attitude, but with the tools to ensure that you’re working within a series of productive, team-wide check-ins rather than a slew of one-off, forgettable video conferences. By using the right tools to improve your meeting recap, you can turn your meetings into efficient and organized episodes that compose the overarching season of your project.
Communication is key
To take your meeting recap to the next level, you’ve got to remember that communication is a make-or-break factor. Goals, timelines, and expectations always need to be conveyed to meeting members whether or not they could be present at the meeting, and if they aren’t, you might end up losing time at your next meeting trying to figure out who’s responsible for what.
For every meeting recap, you’ve got to make sure you have a goal in mind for what you want to accomplish. Without a mission in place, your meeting recap might end up lengthy and unwieldy, or it might be too brief and missing essential information. With Hive, your meeting summary and requests can become streamlined with your agenda and priorities listed separately, and your important goals won’t get lost in the body of your notes. Additionally, any talking point can be turned into a task, and that task can be assigned to an individual.
Your meeting recap should also ensure that everyone is on the same page. Hive’s meeting tools help you share your meeting notes via email with those who use Hive and those who don’t. In those notes, everyone will be able to see their own action items and assigned tasks for the next meeting, which eliminates any uncertainty about responsibilities.
Keep the record straight
Meeting recaps don’t just exist to let everyone know what’s up next. They also remind you where you came from. They’re something of a historical record, or a time capsule, as they report where you were in a project, what work had to be done, and who helped you get there. Preparation for a meeting functions in the same way, as you can have a distinct record of what goals were established prior to the meeting and if those goals were met.
HighFive’s data shows that sticking to a detailed and precise agenda can cause an 80% decrease in meeting time. And the best way to set yourself up for a shorter, more productive meeting in the future is to make sure that your past meeting is well-documented so you don’t end up repeating anything unnecessarily.
This is where it’s essential to utilize the right tools to improve your meeting. To keep an accurate record of what occurs during a meeting, recap main points using the meeting notes tool from Hive. You can format Hive Notes with headers, italics, bold, and bulleted lists, you can assign action items to meetings, or you can add items to your calendar. You can even organize notes based on projects, and keep them to reference later.
Teams can also collaborate on notes in real-time, so note-taking doesn’t have to fall to one person. This allows different people to input different perspectives, creating a fuller picture of what the meeting looked like through multiple lenses.
Be precise
One of the most important parts of any meeting recap is your summary – to make things easier on your whole team, your meeting recap should be specific yet succinct. The best way to juggle this mix of detail and brevity is to take good notes and create great action items.
Action items are the key to a great meeting recap, as they’re helpful ways to track and manage tasks within a project. You can embed your action items into your meeting notes, making them easy to reference. You can also attach relevant documents or tag your teammates. Action items can also be linked to follow-up emails in case a coworker wasn’t able to make it to the meeting.
As for your notes, you can choose from one of Hive’s notes templates to auto-generate the exact kind of layout you need to ensure all of the key features of your meeting are recorded. You can choose from templates for 1:1s, impact/effort analysis, retrospectives, and more – you can also make a personalized template if you have a particular kind of ongoing meeting that requires specific minutes.
Make it memorable
One of the biggest issues people have with meetings is that they can feel unproductive and detrimental to a team’s relationship. A study from Harvard Business Review notes that 62% of polled individuals believe that meetings are a missed opportunity, and could bring teams closer together if they’re done right. So to improve your meeting recap, ensure that you’re bringing your team together by finding ways to make your meeting recap more than just a summary of events.
Maybe your meeting recap includes an inside joke or an update on a teammate’s life event. It could even have something related to a project, like the inclusion of analytics or the celebration of a milestone. Whatever it is, take the time to turn your meeting recap into an opportunity to reignite the connection within your team, and dispel the narrative that meetings have to be boring, unproductive, and irritating. If they’re done right, meeting recaps can kick-start your progress, and make your team feel even more united.
