3 Reasons Why Meeting Notes Should be a Team Sport

Meetings and tools for meetings are in a pretty bizarre state in most companies, especially in contrast to all of the other tools and processes that businesses commit to.

The process and decisions that surround company meetings are key components of team collaboration and communication, so why do we all use different tools?

Think about it - across all of the different departments within a company, the only common factor is that all of these people attend meetings, and none of them use the same tools to manage them.

Here's why we think meetings are the most overlooked source of insights for your company, and why viewing as a team sport can ensure everyone is more connected to business goals.

One store of record for all meeting knowledge means that your company leverages the business value of it's most competitive data - keeping teams aligned, customer-centric and fast-moving.

1. Meetings are where your company IP is generated

The information revolution has become so self-evident that it rarely merits mention when discussing today's issues. However when focusing on company meetings, there is still an interesting point that remains - today, there is almost no insight or data that you can acquire that others can't. Meetings, however, are mostly protected from this trend. Your most differentiated intellectual property is generated every day in meeting discussions, and no one outside of your business has access to that data.

Everything from customer calls to management decisions to business development opportunities is all conducted in the format of a meeting.

If everyone is using an individual tool like Evernote or a department-specific tool like Salesforce, that means everyone else only sees a small part of the puzzle, when in reality you're sitting on all the pieces.

2. More people in your company need to know meeting outcomes than those who attend the meeting

Choosing who should attend a meeting is always a balancing act - too many people and no decisions are made, too little and not enough people are aware.

This is especially ironic when it comes to customer insights. Teams who would benefit from customer conversations (Product, Design, Engineering, Marketing etc) are too busy building for those customers, they don't have time to stop and talk to them all day.

Team-wide meeting notes can solve all of these problems quite easily. It means that meeting attendance stays small enough to optimize for decision-making, and the notes can be used to update people who weren't in the room.

If a Customer Success Manager hears an interesting feature request, that should be extremely accessible to the Product team.

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3. Transitions are inevitable, even for small businesses

Whether they are in the form of employee turnover or growth, relationship handover is important to get right. When ramping up new employees, one of the costliest exercises is getting them up to speed on what was previously agreed on for this customer, what the status is for that partner and who in the team is responsible for what.

Having a bank of key conversations - both internal and external - is your insurance against this kind of disruption.

A team knowledge base for meeting insights means that anyone can pick up a conversation where someone else left off.

If your company pays for a lot of department-specific tools, think about instituting meeting notes as a team sport. Everyone will work better together, your organization will become more customer-centric and you'll be powering your business with data that no one else has access to.