Use WorkBoard to Make Meetings More Efficient

We spend almost 40% of our time in meetings and there are 11 million corporate meetings every day. If that sounds like where your week goes, it’s time to make sure you get results and, dare we say it, more enjoyment for the time spent.

WorkBoard is here to help you streamline the process from scheduling the meeting, creating an agenda, turning a discussion into a series of assigned action items, and making it easy to find important decisions made a month ago. No matter if you’re meeting on quarterly objectives or to decide what flavor of Keurig cups to get for the coffeemaker, make every meeting a great one.

Here’s how:

Start on the Same Page

When you create a meeting or recurring meeting on WorkBoard, you can invite all the members of your team to join, and they can choose to automatically sync the details to their calendar so everyone knows when and where to meet.

Invite attendees to contribute to the agenda to allow for more collaboration and ownership on the contents of the meeting. That way, everybody’s got a stake in the discussion and feels included, especially when it’s discovered that these so-called Pumpkin Spice K-Cups taste nothing like pumpkin or spice and an alternative plan of action is needed.

Create a Dynamic, Actionable Agenda

In WorkBoard, you can create an agenda that includes topics, existing action items and goals, and edit these deadlines and status updates during the meeting. Add key results, documents and other information to your agenda to have all the facts at your fingertips, like perhaps an internal questionnaire done that shows that employees are more productive after their second cup of coffee.

If you use WorkBoard between meetings, everyone’s kept in the loop so they already know if Janet makes an executive decision to order Pumpkin Spice K-Cups. Put that on the meeting agenda, and use the time to discuss the merits of the decision rather than hearing about it for the first time at the meeting.

Take Good Notes and Identify Actions

During the meeting, take notes and takeaways of the discussion and decisions. Capture action items on the stop. What’s great about this feature is that as decisions are made, everybody’s to-do lists are automatically updated in real time. Any adjustments to these action items and goals are made immediately across everyone’s shared boards so that Tony knows he needs to source K-Cup suggestions from an internal focus group, and Emily knows she’s got to do a blind taste test with HR.

This eliminates any confusion of who needs to do what to accomplish the goals and move forward on the decisions made in the meeting.

Move Everyone Forward

With WorkBoard, everyone gets a copy of the meeting minutes automatically — even if they missed the meeting — so they can go over what was discussed, like the decision to go with a house blend flavor of coffee because you just can’t go wrong with that.

Come Spring, when the next seasonal debate about coffee flavors starts you can even search past meeting decisions to see what exactly was decided when. Resend the meeting minutes to the team and avoid having the same meeting twice!

Your WorkBoard meeting planner shows how much time you and the team spend in meetings this month and the number of decisions and actions from the time spent (which can be a bit of shocker when you actually see it!).

What are you waiting for? Improve your meetings this week and you might not need so much coffee.