How I Reached Meeting Productivity Heaven – and Learnt a Few Things About Myself Too

I’ve been blessed by God with an excellent memory. As I approach my 60^th birthday, my eyes aren’t what they used to be, and my wife keeps urging me to wear a hearing aid because she’s getting tired of asking the same question twice. Sometimes more than twice.

But my memory? Still completely intact.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I’m working from home. My calendar is packed with meetings all day long. Topics that I could close with a five-minute walk along the corridor are now turning into thirty-minute calls. Meetings with many participants are the absolute worst. Everyone needs their turn to talk, and I have the feeling that, due to being confined at home, participants use these meetings to let it all out. So much information gets lost. There’s got to be a way to make meetings productive again.

Thank heavens for AudioCodes Meeting Insights, an enterprise solution designed specifically for the meeting-technology world. Meeting Insights easily captures and organizes all meeting-generated content for easy sharing and quick recall. From voice to slides, everything is there. Talk about a gift from above!

So, before each meeting, I simply turn Meeting Insights on. I continue working – reading my emails and writing documents – until someone calls my name (sometimes two or three times). Later on, I indulge in a full-on binge fest of all the meetings I had during the day, fast-forwarding straight to the interesting bits. I take notes, write my action items and assign tasks to my teams. I really believed that I’d found the holy grail of work-at-home methodology.

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That is, until I became totally addicted to the recordings.

I don’t know how many of you have seen yourself in a movie clip and felt bad. Am I really this fat? Am I really speaking this loudly? Listening to my meeting recordings, I started to learn so much about my colleagues – and in particular about myself.

So, what have I learned?

• My memory is far from perfect – it’s selective. I only recall a fraction of the meetings’ content, choosing to remember only the cool assignments, my favorite decisions and good things that others said about me. I repress the rest.
• I prefer listening to my own team and usually get impatient with others,no matter what they are saying.
• Before lunch, when I’m hungry, I make my worst decisions.
• The most important meetings should be scheduled in the mornings.
• In the evening, I’m better off investing in writing since meetings at this time are not productive.
• When I need to get things authorized by my manager, I’d better do it during our weekly and not in a large forum.
• When the topics of the meetings with your closest team are too restricted, there’s no room for brainstorming and new ideas.  
• It’s okay to setup a social meeting – and even have a bit of a gossip. In the long run, these sessions have their own way to increase productivity and deepen the trust between team members.
• Sometimes I like to listen to the same part of the recordings a few times to understand complex ideas.
• In meetings with new customers and business associates, I turn my camera on and then the other party turns the camera on as well. This makes the meeting atmosphere much lighter. You’d be surprised how much you can learn from the other participants’ body gestures, even (and maybe especially) when they are not talking.

For more information, please visit the Meeting Insights webpage

Find out how you too can hit new heights of meeting productivity