Bust the “Meetings are a Waste of Time” Myth with Automated Recap

News item: October 23, 2020
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How often have we heard this, and how many times has anything truly changed?

Meetings are now longer than ever before, and there are growing concerns around their actual usefulness and impact on employee productivity. Research suggests that an average employee will attend around 62 meetings a month, making it difficult to track each meeting’s results and outcomes. Frequently, prep before the meeting and gathering/collating ideas afterwards take up the majority of your time.

Microsoft aims to address all of this with its smart new upgrade to Teams Meetings: automated recaps.

How Teams Meetings Recap Could be a Game-Changer

Despite attending a meeting in person or virtually, a lot of us need written confirmation of what was discussed – making the meeting referenceable, part of our documentation. This is particularly true for external meetings, where you are discussing a variety of different elements with a guest/client. As a result, the meeting host or a designated stakeholder must collate all the meeting highlights into an easily sharable format. This could include:

  • The meeting recording (both audio and video)
  • Any files shared during the meeting
  • A full transcript for accessibility and later reference
  • Any links or notes shared via chat
  • A summary of the discussion

What if you could have all of this generated automatically the moment a meeting comes to an end? That’s exactly what the new Teams Meetings recap feature tries to achieve.

Microsoft positions this as an enabler for productivity in the “new world of work,” suggesting that virtual meetings are now central to our WFH experience.  As travel restrictions continue to be in-place, digital will remain the default, making automated recap extremely relevant.

Key Features We Are Looking Forward To

The Teams Meetings Recap content will show up the details tab of the meeting on your calendar. A link to the content will also be shared automatically via the meeting’s chat window. Interestingly, you don’t need to attend the meeting to view recaps – invited members who were unable to attend can quickly catch up through this content, accessible on their calendar.

The feature functions as a dashboard display:

  • The meeting recording – a complete audio and video file you can open directly from Teams, including the meeting link at a glance
  • The audio transcript – a text document with the complete audio transcript as well as speaker attribution, in case you missed the meeting but want to catch up on all the details
  • Notes – a text document detailing all notes, which could include the meeting agenda, action items, and assigned (with a @) tasks
  • Files – all the files that were shared during the meeting
  • Summary – an auto-generated brief of what the meeting was all about and what happened (e.g., did someone branch into a breakout session, etc.)

Do keep in mind that Microsoft Teams comes with a “persisting notes” feature – if multiple meetings belong on the same series, then their notes will appear as a new section on the same document.

This small upgrade could go a significant way in improving your meeting experience, giving you a clear picture of genuine productivity and meeting efficiency.

This article has been reposted from UC Today. See the source article here.

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