Meetings are a drag for everyone involved – except for that person who loves the sound of their own voice. They go on and on and stray off topic all the time, focusing on unnecessary points to the point where everyone’s forgotten what they came for in the first place.
It is estimated that inefficiencies in some three billion meetings a year in the U.S. cost businesses $37 billion annually. Lengthy and unproductive meetings cost companies, wasting both time and money.
Functional meetings remain an essential part of the communication and unison of any organization and with a rise in business people using their mobile devices at work more, a solution in the form of improved tools and apps could cut administrative tasks and improve efficiency when it comes to meetings.
These startups are leading the way in efficiency-improving tools:
Minute-it
“Most people have never been to an effective meeting.” says Minute-it CEO and founder Damien Thomson.
To make this a thing of the past, he founded Minute-it, the cloud-based SaaS platform which provides users with the tools to create structured meetings, manage assigned tasks and follow ups
It lets you organize the time, date, location of your meeting, seamlessly integrating your calendar with Outlook, Google and iCal, putting all your meetings in one place.
With pre-populated minute templates, you can easily add notes, attendee comments, assign actions, flag decisions and most importantly stay on track with a special countdown clock.
It then automatically produces the minutes, circulates them and files them. You can report and track your productivity and visualize your achievement trends over time to help you understand what’s going well and what’s not.
Its new voice-controlled mobile app Mia, lets users create and record meetings which then converts all discussion into text and archives notes based on date and topic.
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Wrappup
Dubai-based startup Wrappup takes voice-recording technology one step further. Its searchable speech feature means attendees will never miss a beat.
The smart voice recorder can also automatically summarize meetings getting straight to the important bits. It can also recognize the objectives you previously assigned to your calendar, ready to digest the information it records during the meeting.
Founded by Rami Salman, previously a VIP analyst at Unilever, Wrappup was born out of a desire to not only make meetings more efficient, but also to make life easier for the minute-taker.
Wrappup records the meeting and tracks the time spent on each topic so you can pick out the ones that are dominating discussion and stifling other important issues. Being able to re-listen to colleagues in the meeting will jog your memory and put minutes back into context.
The recorded minutes are sent out to all attendees in seconds along with the meeting summary so no one will be left out of the loop.
