🔧 Tool Review: Make meetings useful again - Vowel

You voted, I listened!

For this week’s edition, I will recommend a useful tool with commentary on how it can be used to think about a better work future.

Why are Meetings a huge problem?

We all know that meetings make up a huge amount of the time we spend at work (up to 30%). That equals in millions being wasted each day, each year by companies and by individuals who could use that time to do work instead.

What’s at the root of meeting overload? Three things.

🤝 Coordination - At a small company, you can usually get things done pretty easily - everyone knows each other, the path (physical or digital) is simple and short with little confusion about who does what. As companies scale, and get larger than the famous Dunbar’s Number (150), a phase transition takes place, and things start to get complicated. Lots of people, lots of roles = difficult to coordinate many moving parts. This means more meetings.

🙊 Communication - Culture, language, emotions: these are just a few of the factors that make communication between humans one of the most complicated and underrated problems of our day and age. Some people communicate well verbally, some do better in writing, some do a terrible job at both. More coordination needs more communication, and usually the fastest perceived way to do this, is through meetings. We think that it’s the best way to get our point across.

🏡 Responsibility - Very closely tied with coordination: who is decision maker? Who does what? Do we need to take a joint group decision? It’s human to try and do that in a social manner, and thus, requires meetings.

How to Make Meetings Useful Again

1. 👨‍💼 Solve Roles & Responsibilities - If you don’t get this right at the beginning, or fix it as a priority, you will just try and cure the symptoms. You need to have a solid, structured exercise, and refresh it regularly, so that everyone knows what they’re supposed to be doing, when and how. Some examples of how to this here.

2. 💸 Understand the Cost - When you do a marketing campaign, or when you hire someone, you usually do that as a result of a business projection and return on investment. We often forget that time is a cost. Cost/Opportunity is one of the most important mental models that we need to adopt to almost all aspects of life, and definitely even more so in work. How do you frame it in this way? Simple: you measure the cost and you measure the results.

   1. How much time is being spent in meetings?

   2. How successful have these meeting been in reaching their objective?

   3. How many people have actively participated vs how many have been passive?

These kinds of questions will completely change how you think about meetings. There should be somewhere a line of budget for meetings.

1. 🍪 Stop leaving everything to individuals - Once you’ve done 1) and 2) you’ve already moved into a different headspace for the use of the time in meetings. But you need a practical way to ensure that everyone acts in the same way to set them up and manage them. Which usually needs to be enforced in some way. The best way, in my opinion, is through a tool.

A Tool for Leveling up Meetings and Turning them into Knowledge

A good example of a tool that tries to solve these problems is Vowel.

I’ve broken down its functionalities in two areas:

1. Meeting Organization and Management

Getting this right in my view is the true game changer, because it aims to have a standardized approach to meetings from everyone - avoiding confusion and artistic approaches.

📅 Agendas - We all know this is a key reason why meetings don’t work. No agenda, bad agenda, agenda not being followed and so on. It’s crazy if you think about it; it’s like going on a blind date. You know you’re meeting someone, but not sure what’s going to happen. Things get out of hand easily.

This tool tries to fix this by making Agenda setting and reviewing easy. You can look at your calendar (Google Calendar for now only if I understand correctly) and see which meetings have one and which don’t.

At that point, you can remind the organizer to set one up: a gentle way to do that; my take would be to make it mandatory for the meeting to be organized in the first place, so something native to the e-mail/calendar app being used.

👯‍♀️ Getting input from everyone - slightly still unclear on how that is being baked in the tool, but Vowel claims for this to be one of the features. Now it’s silly to force people to talk or give input if they don’t have any, but at the same time it’s silly for anyone to participate if they don’t have anything to say. In my opinion, this should be solved beforehand, by going through a more severe method to choose / understand who needs to participate by who’s organizing, and a more encouraged refusal of participation from the invitee if she/he thinks they won’t be able to bring value.

Incentivizing interactions is also important, whether it’s through cues or through different tools (i.e. using emojis, voting/poll options etc).

✅ Clear Takeaways - This is another good one. How many times does a meeting have written down, clear takeaways? Again, good feature is for a tool to enforce this and make sure that a short checklist is being filled; either automatically (AI can pickup action words from the conversation) or manually so that everyone is aligned on next steps and ownership.

📄 Templating - How many companies share templates for meetings with their employees? Very few, at least to my knowledge. I don’t want to follow Taylorism and sound like a lover of ‘cookie-cutter’ approaches, but there should always be a best practice foundational layer which then can be molded based on needs. Meetings can be very different, like:

• 1-1s: They require focus on personal aspects, motivation, practical decisions. But should always tie back to yearly goals, professional development and so on. Yet, they almost always get lost in the urgency of day to day operations if you don’t make it a priority.

• Team Meetings: Does everyone get a chance to speak? What subjects do you need to cover? Can be quite broad.

• Project Meetings: Decisions need to be taken, notes and side-by-side reviews need to be done. Maybe need to insert also some screen-sharing collaborative functionality in the template?

• Hiring, Sales calls and so on - Lots of different objectives, useful to follow some guideline also for sharing amongst different team members and being able to compare apples-to-apples.

2. Meetings as a source of Knowledge Capital

If communication happens in a meeting, and decisions are taken, then knowledge is being shared. Knowledge is an asset, and in an ever-changing, accelerating and ultra-competing business world, a very important one too.

So, if meetings have become useful again, why isn’t 100% of their value being documented and harvested? In the datafication of businesses, surely if millions are being spent on this line of business, it must have some value?

Vowel aims to solve this, by doing a few things:

🤖 Making transcripts automatic - Software is now at incredibly efficient at transcribing human language through AI and NLP. Having a reliable meeting transcript available automatically is the first step to using the information it contains.

🔍 Making meetings searchable - Once you have the corpus of the meetings information, you can use it like any other database. Obvious thing to do is to make it searchable, so that people who haven’t attended (who by the way, can replay the meetings - a basic but useful async work method).

🔬 Further categorization and analysis - Vowel doesn’t do this (apparently) but the sky’s the limit to what you can do once you’ve started a path down this road:

• Categorize meetings according to topics

• Analyze output of meetings and correlations of meeting quality with outcome success

• Recommendations and suggestions of meetings based on project work and other criteria

Now these are clearly extremes and may be useless exaggerations - but I personally like to stretch out hypothetical scenarios like this to see if there may be any tests that are worth while trying (whether real or thought experiments).

On a final note: no tool will ever be useful of course if there isn’t a cultural adoption and company mission to make this a priority - so obviously training and using OKRs to include this as a goal is something that needs to happen in parallel.

Hope you found this review useful, and please let me know in the comments if you have used other tools/have seen success with making meeting better in your company!