Ideally, meetings provide value to everyone involved. However, they often leave participants feeling like they wasted their time. That’s because once a meeting is scheduled, the planning stops: It’s on everyone’s calendar, but no one puts attention into making sure that participants will get something worthwhile.
A simple system can change things. Even if you’re not using Teamup to schedule meetings, you can create and share a corresponding Teamup event and use the comments to collect input, plan a better agenda, and gather feedback.
Better recurring meetings
Recurring meetings, in particular, can become rote. The familiar repetition of ongoing weekly or monthly meetings makes them seem unimportant. People with low expectations tend to show up without preparation, contribute little, and set up an ongoing cycle of wasted time. But they don’t have to be. Encourage team members to be part of the planning and add their own input to the agenda, so they’re engaged and participating even before the meeting happens.
When you make changes to a recurring event in Teamup, you can apply those changes to only a single event. So, you can collect input and feedback in the comments, then update just one meeting in the series without changing the rest of the planned or past events.
A living agenda
What if an agenda wasn’t a static list but a living document with relevant input? It can be: Use event comments to gather input on agenda items before the meeting. People can ask questions, provide details, share links, and upload documents. You get a much more helpful, informative agenda and the meeting itself can stay focused on making decisions rather than compiling background information.
Participants can review and prepare for each meeting in advance, without additional emails or message threads. Plus, the comments stay with that instance of the meeting so they can be easily referenced as needed.
Track action items
Participants can use event comments during the meeting to note the action items they’re assigned. Comments are automatically time-stamped, so they provide a clear record that everyone can reference. Nothing has to be converted from notes to emails; it’s all right there, making it easier for each person to follow up on their assigned tasks.
Meetings may never be anyone’s favorite way to spend an hour, but they can go from sources of frustration to effective, useful activities for your team. Try it out with a live demo to explore how Teamup can make meetings better.
