How Can Technology Make Your Business Meetings More Effective?

With a high percentage of business carried out in online meetings, it's essential to know how your business’ technology can help make meetings more effective and impactful. Badly organised or inconvenient online meetings can cause businesses to lose out on prospective deals and clients - being a make-or-break situation in the business world.

Today we discuss how you can boost the efficiency, productivity and effectiveness of your business’ online meetings. Undoubtably you’ll already have the necessary tools at disposal, with many common platforms and apps already catering to the needs of online business. Microsoft has been a pioneer in the world of online meetings and hangouts, with Microsoft Teams becoming a crucial element in the streamlining of online business meetings. Teams is a platform that provides real-time meetings, conversations and collaboration spaces - something we’ll explore in more detail.  

Streamline Meetings with Direct Messages

Make the most of the chat functions in your chosen meeting app, as direct contact between participants and leaders is essential in ensuring no-miscommunication occurs during a meeting. Enabling the direct chat feature allows participants to ask questions between themselves individually, and directly to a meeting leader. It also means questions can be kept on record, allowing participants to refer back to important information and meeting moments.

An exciting new chat development is the ‘schedule send’ feature in Teams. Which allows you to draft and schedule important messages ahead of time, letting users schedule Teams messages to be delivered at a specific later date and time. So, if you have a pertinent and important message that you’re likely to forget prior to the meeting, draft and schedule it ahead of time in order to ensure your colleagues receive it as needed.

Collaboratively Brainstorm

If possible, enable meeting participants to engage with interactive features such as online whiteboards to brainstorm collaboratively. A new Teams feature that emphasises the importance of collaborative brainstorming is ‘collaborative annotations’. This feature enables users to utilise an in-meeting toolset and Whiteboard canvas, letting them react, draw and type in response to meeting content. 

However, if your meeting app doesn’t offer this option, a number of external apps allow geographically disparate users to draw and interact on the same document. With the help of such apps, every participant has the chance to participate and see how the board develops thanks to screen-sharing and tablet finger touch technologies. In most cases, the output can be preserved, and some programs can even convert handwritten notes into searchable text.

Fully Utilise Your Calendar

One of the most popular calendars for businesses is Microsoft Outlook, which allows you to categorise appointments, get help balancing time zones, make reminders, and simply establish virtual meetings with joining links and instructions right from the invite. Did you know that in Outlook you can share calendars and enable several users to interact on the same calendar? This feature makes it easier for teams to organise meetings at times that work for everyone. Having a well-organised and cohesive calendar removes the threat of no-shows, keeping every participant on the same page. Disorganised meetings undoubtably lead to lost business opportunities, making a business seem unprofessional and inefficient.

Maximise Your Meetings

If you want to incorporate some of thee tips in order to maximise your business’ meeting potential, then first investigate the tools already at your disposal. If you operate using Microsoft 365, then a number of tools such as Teams are available to improve your meeting processes. Having specialised in Microsoft products for a number of years, our team will readily show you the features that can boost your business’ efficiency and credibility in the world of online meetings.

If you want to learn more about the meeting and collaboration tools available to your business, then contact our expert team today.