4 Approaches to Better Meetings and Effectiveness

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Without a doubt, meetings remain an essential part  of running your business. They ensure your teams stay on the same page with the information they need to get things done; they connect you with your customers; they help build stronger relationships. Unfortunately, meetings can also waste time and resources—ultimately costing your business.

Here are 4 Ways How to Make Meetings More Effective

1. Define the need

The first step for how to make meetings more efficient comes down to defining the need. If you’re approaching meetings without a clear agenda they will often be unproductive.  In order to improve workplace meetings, ask yourself these 6 questions to determine whether a meeting is necessary.

  1. What is the action item of the meeting: decisive or informing?
  2. What is the size of the meeting?
  3. Is the meeting simply to inform a handful of people, can a memo or email share the information?
  4. Will the meeting solve a problem?
  5. Is there a better alternative, such as using a tool with real-time chat or team announcement features?
  6. Will canceling a meeting negatively impact your employees’ abilities to complete their work?

Once you’ve determined the answers to the six questions above, you’ll be one step closer to better meetings.

2. Simplify Meetings for Success

A positive meeting experience produces positive results for you and your organization.

  • Follow a clearly planned agenda to minimize distraction from your primary purpose and keep your meeting on track
  • Make your expectations crystal clear, and this includes expectations for meeting participation
  • Keep meetings short to improve how employees do their jobs and help steer tangential discussions back on track
  • Ensure all members understand their role to create accountability and produce better meetings

3. Meet like a pro

Lessons learned help improve success, particularly with growing use of inclusive and modern meeting technologies for collaboration. Below we describe approaches to planning meetings for more effectiveness.

  1. Provide a clear agenda
  2. Keep time in mind: start and end on time
  3. Ease the burden of not-taking by recording or capturing a transcription of the meeting
  4. Provide visuals to help members follow along
  5. Send a post meeting recap: Reiterate key discussions and decisions; thank members for participating
  6. Define clear action items and outcomes

Another strategy that you can use to meet like a pro is educating employees on what the 4 P’s of effective meetings are. Purpose, Product, People, and Process are the four Ps required to run an effective meeting. These serve as an excellent model for making meetings more effective and successful.

4. Manage online meetings

Online meetings are here to stay, and are a key way to improve work from home if you have any remote workers. If managed well with a proper approach, online meetings create new possibilities for involving team members and sharing information through digital collaboration.

  • Ensure everyone has the right technology, invites, and call-in info.  Make sure attendees will be able to see, hear, and speak clearly
  • Keep attendance focused on those that need to be there, avoiding unnecessarily large meetings
  • Welcome members and outline how you plan to manage interactions, who speaks when, and use of the chat window
  • Use the mute features to minimize distractions
  • Keep your meeting secure using passwords and other features
  • Reduce uncertainty by recording the meeting or keeping a transcript for future reference

Conclusion on How to Make Meetings More Effective

Meeting attendees will follow your lead, so make sure it’s a strong one. By continuously honing your meeting strategies and skills, monitoring what does and doesn’t work, and actively pushing to convert decisions into action, your meetings will become more effective over time.

For more on the topic, check out The Ultimate Meeting Guide. To review your meeting tools, conference room setups, and methods, schedule an introductory call and connect with our team of Cloud Advisors.

Modern Workplace: Benefits and Challenges

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The modern workplace brings together teams, information, and processes to empower our teams and enable our businesses. Powered by Microsoft, Google Cloud platforms, getting the most out of our systems requires more than simply moving from one system to another. Managing adoption and ensuring users understand how to use tools effectively increases individual and team productivity and efficiency. Below, we look at the most notable modern workplace benefits, as well as three major challenges to overcome.

5 Modern Workplace Benefits

Most of our businesses realize benefits when we create our modern workplace with Microsoft, Google, and other key solutions.

1 Faster and more reliable communication
The modern workplace improves our ability to communicate. Beyond fast Internet connections, the integration of voice, messaging, audio/video conferencing, file sharing, real-time collaboration, and other tools lets us work together and share information in the ways that work best for us. Secure access from virtually anywhere enables us to work where we are most productive.

2 Enhanced efficiency and productivity
The modern workplace ushers in efficiency and productivity in many ways. Automating tasks and workflows, improved access to files and information, and embedded AI help users complete work more effectively.

3 Lower costs; Higher profits
Technology-driven increases in efficiency and productivity decrease operating costs. Reduced travel, faster time to market, quicker customer response times, and faster and more effective decision-making all result from the reliability, mobility, and productivity of a modern workplace.  These benefits save time and money, and drive revenue and profits.

4 Greater transparency and interconnected operations
You can replace complex, bureaucratic processes when you match access to data and information with updated processes that take advantage of integrated, secure applications, tools, and services. Whether simple file sharing or ensuring you have one record of customer information across your systems, the modern workplace helps connect, streamline, and simplify.

5 Improved security
Modern workplaces are more secure. Integrated, layered security is embedded into the architecture of cloud infrastructure services, designed and built to meet your security and data privacy needs. Beyond the traditional focus of protecting physical computers in specific locations, security for the modern workplace protects the systems, networks, applications, data, and processes. You also protect your people with identity and access management that removes the physical boundaries of security.

3 Challenges of the Modern Workplace

Moving to a modern workplace, like any, change comes with challenges.

1 Resistance to Change
Even when they understand the objectives and benefits, some members of your team will hesitate to embrace change. Helping team members understand how the changes will benefit them individually —  how it will enable them succeed — improves buy-in and acceptance. Offering tools to help them learn and apply new features and capabilities supports their personal growth and overall adoption of new apps, tools, and processes.

2 Inadequate Training
Turning on a new app, tool, or process is not enough. “One and Done” sessions are not effective.  To fully benefit from your modern workplace investments, your team needs to understand your apps and tools as they use them. Individuals retain and apply learning best when they have time to use what they have learned. Adoption plans that provide training and support relevant to a person’s role and responsibility in small, manageable doses, over time are most effective.

3 Mismatched Technology
Technology for the sake of technology leads to disaster. Picking the best technology that is not the best fit creates problems. Start your selection process by defining your business goals and objectives. Identify the types of technologies you need and want to support your objectives. Then select the specific technologies that match your prioritized needs and wants.

Contact Us to Learn More About Modern Workplace Tools & Solutions

Email us or complete our contact form to discuss how a modern workplace, including Microsoft, Google, and other key tools, can help your business thrive and grow.

The Business Case for Teamwork Solutions

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CollaborationHow our teams work, and our businesses run, continues to evolve. Teamwork — communication and collaboration — brings people together to share information, work together, and accomplish common goals and objectives. When you have a place to create and make decisions, you empower your team to achieve.

Market Dynamics

Finding secure, easy ways to connect across teams and locations is a high priority if you want to create a competitive advantage in today’s quickly changing business landscape.

83% of knowledge workers depend on technology to work together

72% of workers will work remotely, full or part time

35% of knowledge workers still collaborate on documents using email

 

Cloud Forward teamwork solutions enable you to customize your workspace, keep your team secure, and communicate more effectively.

Challenges You Face

Most businesses see the value of Cloud Forward solutions, but migrating to the cloud does not ensure results. Real value requires changing some of the ways you work, leveraging features, and enhancing individual and team productivity and effectiveness.

Communications: How can you bring teams and resources together?

  • Enable real-time communication
  • Provide secure mobile access
  • Empower teams to work remotely

Mobility: How can you enable employees to work from virtually anywhere, on any device?

  • Enhance mobility within your company
  • Reduce overhead, and save money on office space, as employees work remotely

Secure Sharing: How can you make it easier to connect with customers, co-workers, and others?

  • Secure and preserve company data when sharing information with others
  • Distinguish between the information external users can and cannot access
  • Keep track of who has what information

Solutions that Drive Success

Adopting Microsoft 365 means more than migrating emails and files. Adopting Microsoft 365 involves managing change; educating your team on ways to use the teamwork technology to:

Get more done

Teamwork technology embedded in Microsoft 365 enables productivity solutions that:

  • Streamline teamwork
    Integrate team chats, meetings, and files in one place; increase productivity
  • Enable real-time teamwork
    Make it easy for teams to work together on documents; rapidly advance ideas and innovation
  • Connect applications
    Provide the tools and services customers use every day to collaborate; connect people, information, and ideas

Work better together

Microsoft Teamwork solutions enables collaboration solutions that help you:

  • Improve security
    Strengthen your overall security posture and improve compliance and reduce your use of unsecure apps
  • Work from virtually anywhere
    Use digital tools to empower teamwork across your mobile workforce, no matter where your people work or what devices they use

Build your business

Microsoft 365 makes it easier to set up and manage users, devices, and data within a highly secure, cloud-based productivity platform.

  • Use an integrated solution
    Save time, money, and the headache of managing multiple vendors and technologies for security and team solutions
  • Reduce costs
    Microsoft technology provides a nearly 80% cost savings over similar technologies provided by third-party vendors

Partner for Success

We understand that change is challenging. We also see that the results outweigh the effort when teams embrace and adopt new capabilities and improve how they work.  Empowering your team enables success.  Through our Managed Cloud Services, we co-manage your IT services and provide on-going education and support to help your team adopt and leverage new capabilities.  We help your employees succeed at their jobs; we enable your company to achieve your desired results.

Contact us or email us to learn more. Or, schedule a complimentary Cloud Advisor Session and discuss your goals, challenges, and opportunities.

Exchange Server Zero-Day Threat

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On March 3, 2021, Microsoft issued an emergency Microsoft Exchange Server patch alert for multiple zero-day vulnerabilities that are being exploited by a nation-state affiliated group. The order impacts on-premise Exchange Servers 2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019. Older editions are past end of life and do not receive security updates. Microsoft highly recommends that you take immediate action to apply the patches for any on-premises Exchange deployments. The first priority is servers which are accessible from the Internet (e.g., servers publishing Outlook on the web/OWA and ECP).

To patch these vulnerabilities, you should move to the latest Exchange Cumulative Updates, followed by the relevant security updates on each server.

The vulnerabilities and risk do not exist for any version of Microsoft Exchange Online. The risk does not impact any version of Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Office 365.

As discussed in past posts, one of the benefits of cloud-based solutions is the integrated management of the environment. You are not depending on how well your IT provider of staff keep up with maintaining your systems and your security updates. Moving your infrastructure to the cloud shifts the burden of maintenance and operations, letting your team focus on activities that help your run and grow your business.

Want to learn more, contact us and schedule a complimentary Cloud Advisor session.