Meetings are some of the most important interactions that take place in a company. They are a place where all the top people in the company come together to discuss all the latest information about the company and what they need to do to improve on certain areas of business. One thing a lot of business are doing nowadays is transferring over to an electronic meeting.
But what exactly is an electronic meeting? An electronic meeting process is a guide that takes you through the the various stages of a meeting by using a productivity software. This specific software has been designed to assist you with the preparations and follow-up stages of your meeting and even the actual meeting itself.
Many meetings have an agenda that is distributed to all the people involved. Meeting productivity software takes this process one step further and allows you to store meeting goals, agenda items and relevant files in an electronic workspace. You can then send this workspace to all the people involved in the meeting via e-mail prior to the meeting.
During an electronic meeting you can access the meeting workspace to go through agenda items, goals and attached files. If you want, you can even get software that has timers incorporated into it that guide you through all of your agenda items which will help you stay focused.
If you have ever been in a meeting where a big decision was made and nobody was held accountable, then this software offers you a solution. In most meetings, time is set aside to record all of the decisions that are being made, the tasks that are assigned and their deadlines. You can even get some software that integrates the assigned tasks into the task feature of your e-mail system. Once the meeting has concluded the electronic workspace, as well as a record of everything that occurred, can be e-mailed to participants.
There are also a lot of benefits to having an electronic meeting. By implementing an electronic meeting process, you can shorten your meeting times by nearly 50%. If that isn’t enough for you, then you can also consider some other benefits like:
- Having all your meeting materials housed in one location
- Having all decisions and tasks recorded
- Having permanent records of meeting files
- Having easy access to past meeting files
- Having all meeting workspaces kept private and secure
If you work at a company that meets on a regular basis then an electronic meeting is perfect for you. It is also perfect if you generate and share information, need to follow up on tasks easily or strive to make your time used more efficiently.
Source: Effective Meetings
Brett
January 4th, 2011
Good article; Do you have any thoughts on online electronic meeting software that you recommend or prefer (planning, facilitation, artifacts repository)?
-Brett
LessMeeting.com