Meeting Management Tools — How to maximize your teams efficiency and performance during meetings
The average person spends 7 years of their life in meetings which adds up to about 6 hours/week in meetings.
As an entrepreneur your time is one of the most valuable assets you have and you simply don’t have an extra 6 hours a week to sit around in meetings that are unproductive and don’t pay off.
I have believe that there are three reasons for unproductive lengthy meetings.
- Not having an agenda limits the amount of preparation that can be expected of team members and means that the purpose/objective of the meeting is unclear.
- Not having a time limit set on the meeting allows people the freedom to drag meetings out longer than necessary and offers them the freedom to discuss things that are off topic.
- Not following up on action items from the meeting. If people do not complete the action items that were assigned to them the meeting was a waste of time and could cause further meetings reiterating previous discussions.
Meeting management tools were created to solve all of the above issues with new automated technology. I believe that the below features should be non- negotiable when it comes to finding the tool that works best for your business.
- Being able to collaborate when creating and modifying an agenda for your meeting is one of the most important features a meeting management tool can offer. This tool allows managers to draft up an agenda, link tasks for team members and allow notes on the respective tasks to be taken throughout the meeting. This saves valuable time as team members can prepare for their meetings, helps to ensure that no discussion topics are forgotten and that everything that gets discussed has a purpose.
- Time tracking is the next feature that a meeting management tool can offer a team. By adding a time limit to meetings, managers are able to ensure that meetings do not drag out, and all members remain focused and productive throughout the meeting. New features on some of these tools allow for managers to breakdown time limits right down to each individual agenda item which ensures the meeting remains on schedule and on topic.
- Finally meeting management tools now offer automated follow up emails to the meeting members who had tasks assigned to them. This ensures that any assigned tasks/projects/decisions do not get forgotten about and this service prevents future meetings from happening without progress being delivered.
After researching all of the meeting management tools that are available online, I have narrowed my search down to the four tools that provide all three of the above features.
I will compare the following four meeting management tools and allow you to decide which one works best for your team. Since all four of these tools provide similar offerings, the finer details like the complexity, reliability, pricing, design, and customizability ultimately be the factors that determine the best tool.
Price: $20/year (150 meetings) — $70/year (unlimited meetings) + one free trail meeting
Integration: Zapier, Google, Slack, Outlook, Office 365
Complexity: Easy
Features: This tool was by far the easiest to set up and and learn how to use. Its minimalistic layout and quick sign up process makes this an easy to use program.
Unique: My favourite feature that I noticed while using this tool was the “Improvement Tips” that are always on the top bar. This ensures that as teams get more comfortable on Amazemeet, they can continue to explore and learn about improving their meetings allowing them to take full advantage of the software.
Price: $12/month (1 license), $59/month (10 licenses), $225/month (50 licenses) — 14 day free trial for all pricing options
Integration: Google, Office 365, Outlook
Complexity: High
Features: This tool was the most complicated one to learn how to use. I found its design overwhelming and very busy. Some of the features include having a mobile application, the option to customize the branding on the agenda/notes, and the ability to schedule reoccurring meetings.
Unique: This tool takes its integration a step further than the other tools, allowing you to access all of these features without ever leaving the calendar on Google, Office 365 or Outlook. When creating a new event in your calendar software of choice, the above screen from Less Meeting will show up in the “Notes” section of your event!
Price: $2.49/user/month (basic access — no features), $7.49/user/month (all below features+Free Trial), $14.99/user/month (all features + 24/7 support)
Integration: Google, Evernote, Dropbox, Zapier, Office 365, iCloud
Complexity: Easy
Features: This software was very easy and intuitive to learn how to use and its clean design is aesthetically pleasing. Some of the feature that this software has include the ability to share documents and edit them in realtime, the option to use it on their mobile application, the ability to export any notes that were taken and customizable branding for these notes/agenda.
Unique: With the premium package Get Minute allows you to use Zapier to integrate any task list software that your team currently uses to track projects.
Price: BeeFree (1–5 users + limited features), or get BeeTeam plan — $10/month (1 user), $55/month (10 users), $80/month (20 users), $110/month (30 users), $160/month (50 users)
Integration: Outlook, ICS, Office 365, Google, Antidote
Complexity: Easy
Features: This tool was easily my favourite to learn how to use. The intuitive and fun design of the website made the entire process fun and enjoyable. Some of the features that this software offers includes a mobile version, statistics tracker for the efficient levels of each meeting, different levels of management between team members (team, registered users, guests) and the ability to share documents.
Unique: BeeNote offers a third pricing plan for board members to use and this plan offers the most number of features! This plan allows for board members to have different stages of approval for the minutes, living polling/quorum to occur during the meeting and customizable viewing options for the team VS meeting participants.
Final verdict: Ultimately the level of effectiveness of any meeting management tool completely depends on each individual teams specific needs. As an entrepreneur myself, my favourite software to experiment on was BeeNote because it offered a large variety of features and the design of the application ensured that users were not overwhelmed with information. This was also one of the more price effective tools since you could host unlimited meetings with up to 5 people for free with the BeeFree plan!
I look forward to hearing your opinions on different meeting management tools and which ones work best for your team!
Online Video Conferencing
One of the biggest complaints noted by other bloggers is that none of the above tools have an integrated video conference option. The above software was created as a tool for in person meetings so that one person could lead and track the progress of the meeting. If a meeting needs to happen online, the above tools can be used in addition to the video software that would be running. Although it is inconvenient to download another application for this purpose, it will ensure that the video/voice calls are delivered with a high quality and ultimately improves the reliability of each application individually as neither is reliant on each other.
Microsoft teams
Price: Free option
Complexity: Easy
Features: Video conference integration, chat lines for teams and team members, and the ability to collaborate on files in realtime.
