Meeting management: from room clashes to tracking the decisions made

On Tuesday morning two teams meet at the door of the same meeting room; both had booked the room in their own calendar, but neither could see the other’s entry. Meeting management software is a corporate calendar system that plans the agenda, internal and external attendees, location and reminders of meetings in one place.

In this article we look at the three phases of a meeting, that is before, during and after, using the Meeting Management module inside YazSis KurumsalPortal.

Before the meeting: calendar and attendees

In the module, meetings are tracked in a shared corporate calendar, with a daily agenda and a monthly view. The calendar is checked before planning, which reduces clashes. In-house employees and external attendees are added to the same meeting record, and together with the location information, who will attend is visible in one place. Catching a clash at the planning stage is far cheaper than trying to sort it out in the corridor on the day of the meeting. Having the external attendee in the same record also keeps the notification from turning into a separate e-mail chain.

Before you put a meeting in the calendar, ask yourself these questions:

• Is there another meeting at the same time for the same location or the same attendee?
• Is anyone attending from outside, and have they been added to the meeting record?
• Is the meeting confidential; has a confidentiality level been set?
• Can you write the purpose of the meeting in one sentence? If you cannot, a short message or e-mail may be enough instead of a meeting.

During the meeting: confidentiality and attendees

Not every meeting has to be open to everyone. In the module, a confidentiality level is set for a meeting, and confidential meetings are managed in the same calendar. So for a sensitive discussion there is no need to start a separate notebook or a scattered e-mail chain; each meeting sits in a single calendar with its own confidentiality level. Setting the confidentiality level while the meeting is being planned reduces the “who can see this?” question later. Agree on a shared criterion inside the organization for which meetings count as confidential; if you do not spell out examples such as management discussions or hiring interviews up front, everyone will decide by their own interpretation.

For meetings with external attendees, it also helps when the time, place and attendee information are clearly visible in a single record. When a customer or supplier arrives, the person welcoming them reads from the same record when and where they will meet; there is no need to collect confirmations by phone or message.

After the meeting: the outcome goes on record

Meetings are often well planned, but the outcome ends up on scraps of paper, in personal notebooks or in a verbal understanding nobody remembers. That is why the module’s workflow is completed by recording the outcome: after the meeting takes place, the outcome is added to the meeting record. This way, which meeting took place when, with whom and how it closed is kept as a traceable meeting history. When the question “who made this decision, and in which meeting?” comes up three months later, the answer is in the record, not in someone’s memory.

Whether the record is useful depends on what is written in it. Make it a habit to write the outcome note so that it answers these three questions:

1. What was decided? Not a summary of the discussion, but the decision itself.
2. Who is responsible? Who takes on the work arising from the decision.
3. By when? A date that can be followed up.

Reminders mean attendance does not depend on memory

Automatic reminders are sent for planned meetings. Meetings also appear in the daily agenda and the monthly calendar, so attendance does not depend on people’s memory. The aim of the reminder is to reduce the number of attendees who are late or do not show up at all, and to support attendance. This also lightens the organizer’s work: instead of calling everyone one by one or sending last-minute messages, they can leave the reminder to the system.

Who uses the module, and how?

• Managers: plan the meeting, set the attendees and the confidentiality level, have the outcome recorded, and look at earlier decisions in the meeting history when preparing a new meeting.
• Assistants: check the calendar, choose a suitable time and location, maintain the attendee list, and after the meeting follow up on whether the outcome has been entered.
• All teams: follow the meetings that concern them from the agenda and receive reminders.

The expected gains of the module fall under three headings: fewer calendar clashes, higher attendance and a traceable meeting history. Whether these happen depends on the calendar being used as the single source; if meetings are still arranged by e-mail and verbally, the shared calendar remains incomplete. Because it runs on the same user and permission infrastructure as the other KurumsalPortal modules, employees do not need to open a new account. To start, you can pick the type of meeting that has the most clashes, for example weekly management meetings, and move those into the module first; as the calendar habit takes hold, other meetings get added on their own.

For details, see the Meeting Management page; for the whole platform, take a look at the KurumsalPortal page.