Everyone knows the apprehension that strikes upon receiving a vaguely titled calendar invite for a two-hour meeting on a Tuesday afternoon. What is the goal of this meeting? Who is involved? Do I need to be there? What do I need to do to prepare?
Inefficient meetings can derail a whole day. That’s why we use Uni to answer these questions and make our meetings more effective.
What is Uni?
Uni is a decision making platform for teams. It helps to capture and organize everyone’s ideas in an intelligent way and stay on track to make smarter decisions. We use it to decide on everything from product development to user feedback. We also use it for better meetings.
Every meeting needs a clear goal
The point of a meeting is to work together to gather input and make a decision. With Uni, we start this decision making process by asking a clear question to the group. For our weekly planning meeting, we ask, “What should we work on this week?”
We ask the meeting question plenty of time in advance
Our meetings go more smoothly when everyone has had time to think over the topic in advance. Everyone can give their input in their own time. People who are more shy about speaking up can participate without being put on the spot. Because of this, we get ideas from not just the usual suspects, but introverts, remote workers — everyone!
Teammates can comment on ideas to give feedback, add context, or get clarification. Everyone can buzz ideas that they like to show support for their favorite ideas before any decisions are made in the meeting.
Uni helps us decide who should be in the meeting
When we ask a question on Uni we decide which teams and skills to bring in. However, anyone with a good idea can add their input. This allows motivated teammates to contribute to decisions they really care about. The meeting owner can see who is passionate about a problem and invested in a decision, and can use that information to invite people to the meeting whose participation could be helpful.
Uni also aids the meeting owner by informing them on perspectives that have not contributed to the question. Oftentimes in the decision making process, teams that should be informed are left out, remote workers are overlooked, or entire viewpoints that should have advised a decision are not consulted. Uni keeps decision makers aware of which perspectives might be missing from a decision, and even gives a decision a score based on inclusivity (more on this is in our next post!)
If we’re meeting with people outside of our team, we invite them to our meeting question in Uni as a guest.
When meeting time rolls around, everyone is ready
By the time we all sit down to meet, most of the work is already done. Everyone in the meeting knows what the goal is and comes prepared to discuss the ideas. We use the Uni question to guide the meeting by sorting the ideas by buzz and discussing the ideas we like.
When meetings don’t have structure, people often just converge on the first idea or listen to the loudest person in the room. With Uni, we have a sense of all of the possible ideas and can avoid those pitfalls.
We leave the meeting with clear next steps
When the meeting is done and the decision is made, Uni sends an overview of the final decision to everyone who participated. We also send the decision overview to our Slack channel if we want to make sure that even people who didn’t participate are informed.
We can also hand off our ideas to a project management system (we use Trello) so that we can move forward with implementation.
For every decision, Uni highlights a few people who made significant contributions to the decision- we want to make sure everyone’s hard work is recognized!
No more ‘invite fright’
With Uni, our meetings have been more efficient, rewarding, and pleasant. Instead of starting our meetings with this:
We start with this:
Start having better meetings- join us on Uni today!
