ARI BIXHORN - Senior vice-president, Panopto
Whether meetings are held face to face or as online Web conferences, at most organizations they’re PowerPoint-driven lectures – structured to offer little opportunity to get real work done and real decisions made. Technology now offers an alternative: the “flipped meeting.” With a flipped meeting, the organizer shares information ahead of time, uses in-meeting time to make decisions and then follows up with a summary to keep the team up to date and projects moving forward.
Video is a fundamental part of an effective flipped-meeting experience. You can record pre-meeting presentations and post-meeting follow-up videos that are much more effective than email.
Pre-meeting presentation summary video
Sharing your meeting materials ahead of time with your team is essential to successfully flipping your meeting. By recording a three- to five-minute video summary of your presentation, you help attendees understand the goals of the meeting, familiarize themselves with your topic and come to the meeting prepared with a point of view for discussion.
Post-meeting summary/action items
The post-meeting summary, outlining action items, deliverables and owners, is essential to keeping the work moving. When your meeting wraps up, take five minutes with your laptop webcam or smartphone and record yourself summarizing your discussion and detailing decisions and next steps.
Flipping meetings can help you win back wasted time, ensure that every meeting you attend is productive and empower your teams to collaboratively make smarter, timelier decisions.
ALYN EDWARDS - Partner, Peak Communicators
Technology can replace face-to-face business meetings, but not in-person relationship-building. It’s no surprise that more and more meetings are taking place virtually. Whether your team is based in the same city or all over the world, digital conferencing solutions can represent huge time- and cost-saving opportunities for yourself and your clients.
In our company, we have used Google Hangouts to deliver media training seminars for spokespeople in Vancouver, Dallas and Berlin simultaneously. The training ran as smoothly and efficiently as it does when we train clients in person, while saving everyone’s time because no one had to travel to the meeting.
Large tech companies such as Cisco Systems and Apple have long capitalized on this trend. Since 2009, they have transitioned many physical symposiums to virtual conferences, allowing the companies to easily fulfil the two main objectives of meetings: exchanging information and networking.
This begs the question: why do some businesses still have face-to-face meetings? Because nothing replaces the interaction and connection that can occur at an in-person meeting, at least at the beginning of the relationship. Human interaction still means a lot in relationship-building, and digital mediums can’t always communicate the passion participants might have for their projects, products and motivations.
So, what’s a business to do? Once you are engaged in the work and have an established relationship with your client, digital conferencing, emails and telephone calls are the best for quick and efficient sharing of information. But for relationship-building and larger, more important strategy meetings, park the technology and get in a room together. Relationships matter, and personal interaction can help build a better future.
ANDREA GOERTZ - Senior vice-president, Telus
Absolutely. Today, with a workforce of highly mobile professionals, face-to-face meetings are increasingly difficult to co-ordinate. Factoring in the cost, productivity downtime and environmental impact often associated with travelling to in-person meetings, it’s no wonder more companies are looking to technology-driven solutions to help with these challenges.
At Telus, we don’t believe that you have to move people in order to share ideas. In 2008, we invested in TelePresence to help reinvent the face-to-face meeting through the power of technology. TelePresence essentially mimics colleagues sitting across the table from one another, whether their offices are 20 or 2,000 kilometres away. Usability inspires adoption, and TelePresense activates with a single touch of a button – a marked departure from traditional video conferencing systems.
Removing physical or geographic constraints from meetings immediately makes them more efficient. We find that meetings are more likely to start on time with everyone present, given there is little to no travel involved, and meetings run more smoothly as technology allows us to instantly share links and presentations, keeping everyone focused.
Life doesn’t happen on a schedule. Flexible work hours and locations empower team members to work when and where they are most effective, increasing engagement and overall happiness at work. At Telus, we’re able to effectively support work-life integration through the smart use of technology. While behaviours and management styles are critical to this model’s success, there are tremendous benefits to professionals and businesses when technology is used to empower mobile, flexible work.
