Meetings are an essential part of life in universities and colleges, but due to the size of the institutions, and the complexities of the organizations being split into different schools and departments, many of them are inefficient, lack focus and could be much shorter.
Research by Boise State University showed that on average, the teaching staff were spending 15% of each working day in meetings, let alone the time needed to prepare for them and then follow up on the actions post-meeting.
This research was further enhanced with the key findings from research that eShare conducted, looking at how long the average employee spends attending, and preparing for meetings.
We’ve all sat in meetings where the agenda has been thrown out of the window only 5 minutes in and the important document that’s been emailed out isn’t in fact the most up-to-date version so important points cannot be covered. It can be infuriating.
The results of the research undertaken showed that the on average, in any given week, a person will spend more than one working day preparing for, and attending meetings.
Across a 40 year career, this equates to a total of 17,470 hours – two entire years of someone’s life, or around 10 years of work time. Now we have spelt it out for you, wouldn’t it be better if the efficiency of meetings was tackled head on?
With MeetingSquared, organising and attending meetings can be a whole lot easier for the 1.2 billion Microsoft Office users around the world, solving problems at all three stages of a meeting – before, during and after.
MeetingSquared gives meetings structure and combines all the meeting information into one place. It can be accessed in your SharePoint site, via Microsoft Office 365 and even as a tab in Microsoft Teams allowing you to handle your meetings entirely within the Microsoft ecosystem. This flexibility and eShare’s intuitive design means that it’s so simple to integrate with your faculty or teams’ existing collaborations and systems.
SharePoint:
Sitting directly inside your SharePoint site, MeetingSquared harnesses the power of your SharePoint or Office 365 account and makes it easy to build and manage agenda-led meetings and capture follow up actions and notes. An interactive agenda has everything you need in one place – documents, past minutes, third party sites – plus automated actions to remind members to complete their tasks. Say goodbye to lost emails and missing minutes, with MeetingSquared everything is in one place where you need it.
Outlook:
The free Agenda Builder Outlook Add In is a powerful meeting management tool when using MeetingSquared, helping you build agendas and share documents from within Outlook. Managing your meetings this way saves you time and ensures your documents and agendas are both secure and auditable. And if portability is important, then it is also accessible on Windows, Android and iPad tablets to access your meeting agendas and documents from your tablet anytime, anywhere.
Microsoft Teams:
Integrating the web view of MeetingSquared inside Teams allows you to create and manage meetings alongside the other functions of the platform such as team chat, giving instant and auditable information directly to the people that need it directly inside Microsoft Teams. By syncing your MeetingSquared account within Teams, you can make audio or video calls relating to your upcoming meeting or agenda items and amend them all within one platform and keep everything totally secure.
Using a meeting management system like MeetingSquared in this way means that there is total control and transparency over your meetings and your meeting documents bringing your meetings fully into the digital age. eShare CEO Alister Esam said on the subject:
“Anyone attending a meeting must have the relevant emails, documents and agenda available on their device, and be able to annotate and share those with ease. Furthermore, actions should be agreed and recorded so you don’t have to rely on an attendee’s faulty memory to refer to what was discussed. Other areas of business have been brought up-to-date in terms of attitudes and technology, and it is high time that meetings did the same.”
If you’d like to hear more about our research, or are interested in learning more about MeetingSquared and how it integrates within your Microsoft account, do get in touch with us.
