Asynchronous meetings with Digital

Thanks for joining us for this session on how to better optimise your meetings. Here’s all the notes and links from the session.

Stats about meetings

•Employees spend 231 hours each year in work meetings

•63% of onsite meetings are an hour or longer compared to 56% of online gatherings—which usually range from 30 minutes to an hour

•71% of senior managers believe meetings are both unproductive and inefficient

Components of Good Meetings

•Reason for meeting

•Relevant attendees

•Relevant updates

•Agenda

•Actions

•Next-steps

•Task and finish sub-groups

•Timings

•Deadlines 

Sync Vs Async

•Sync – in-person or virtual real-time meetings

•Async – emails, chat apps, organised systems, video updates, collab platforms, connected workspaces

Types of Async Meetings

•Daily stand-ups – all use the tool at a specific time

•Weekly/project updates – where different teams can check in on updates

•Team meetings – using an agenda to update each other on their priorities, workload, tasks etc.

Pros and Cons of Async Meetings

•Pros

– more flexible across time-zones, staff hours, and learning styles

-easy to recap, reflect or review info without taking up others time

-can tag, ask questions of others etc. directly

•Cons

-longer turn-around

– less human interactions

– not instant

– hard to “bounce ideas around”

Traditional Async Tools

•Emails

•Informal messaging apps/channels like WhatsApp or SMS

•Intranets

•Team Sharepoint Sites

•Online documents (comments/edits)

Top Async Meeting Tools

Planner Boards – For more formal scenarios – good to help you track what you said to who, and who you might be supporting

https://tasks.office.com/ https://app.asana.com/ (we always have a preference of using Asana)

Forms.office.com

Video Tools – Such as Loom that for free offers 25videos, 5minutes long for free, via web or app

https://www.loom.com/

Collab Boards – like Miro, Mural or Whiteboard which enabled sharing and engagement without logins

https://www.whiteboard.team/

Platforms Plugin-Ins like…

Internal Wiki Pages like Inside msteams https://www.howtogeek.com/697601/how-to-use-microsoft-teams-built-in-wiki/

Or Range

https://www.range.co/

Or if you want to take your Async meetings seriously, check out a Connected Workspace tool like Notion or ClickUp

https://www.notion.so/pricing https://clickup.com/pricing

We like ClickUp as the free version enables whiteboard, document sharing and collab tools you’ll find much better than in Notion.