The point of a meeting isn’t the actual meeting, right? The meeting is a way to bring a number of people together to collaborate and accomplish a number of tasks. It might be to ideate, to make a decision, to understand a problem or opportunity.

When the meeting is happening, the role of all parties is to commit themselves 100% to focus on the meeting and actively contribute. Not only does this make the meeting go faster, but it drives greater outcomes for the participants and the organizations.

" the role of all parties is to commit themselves 100% to focus on the meeting and actively contribute "

However, because people are people, it takes a considerable amount of effort to manage the purely logistical aspects of a meeting. The right participants must be identified, the right agenda and order of agenda must be crafted and accurate notes and action items must be documented. This list forms the basis of good, basic meeting hygiene.

It is unfortunate that we must spend so much valuable brain power on setting things up for success. That’s why we created the Meeting Mentor feature in PeachyHR. It is your little robot assistant that is constantly helping you to build better meetings and doing so in a way that lets you save your energy for the important content of the meeting and your other daily responsibilities.

Basic Meeting Hygiene

So, what does the PeachyHR Meeting Mentor do? First and foremost it ensures that the basic meeting hygiene is healthy in your organization, including:

• Meetings are scheduled well in advance of the start time to give participants the ability to collaborate on the agenda and to prepare.
• Agendas are published well in advance of the meeting so that all parties can set their expectations and do any necessary homework.
• Discussion notes are recorded along with the related agenda topic.

Next Level Meetings

Meeting Mentor goes further to help support your generative, high-performance culture with the following additional features:

• Identify one-sided meetings, where agendas have only been created by one party. Particularly in one-on-ones, coaching and mentoring sessions, the agenda should be jointly created by both parties to enforce accountability and active participation in the relationship.
• Capture and assign action items directly within the context of the meeting. It even goes as far as highlighting outstanding action items that are related to a previous meeting that have yet to be completed.
• Agenda items missed, explicitly track when an item was not discussed and ensure it was intentional (vs clerical mistake).

There is a lot more in store for Meeting Mentor, but it already does a lot of heavy lifting to put best practices for meetings on auto-pilot.

If you had an automated meeting assistant what would it do for you?

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