8 Ways to Implement Meeting Productivity Software With Your Team

If you’ve recently purchased new meeting productivity software, it’s about time to start thinking about your implementation plan! Smoothly navigating the change management process will allow your team to get started faster, which will reduce how much time it takes you to see benefits like increased productivity, better cross-team alignment, and more on-time project deliveries. And if you’re still deciding if you need meeting productivity software, you can also use this guide to see what it will take to get value out of the tool! 

• How do I know if my team needs meeting productivity software?
• 8 ways to seamlessly implement a new meeting productivity software
• How to seamlessly implement Fellow into your team

How do I know if my team needs meeting productivity software?

• Meetings are unproductive
• Meetings go over time
• Meetings have too many people in them
• Meetings go off-topic
• Meetings lack accountability
• Meetings lack participation
• Attendees come unprepared
• Your team has too many meetings

Meetings are unproductive

When there’s no plan for how the conversation will go, meeting time can easily be wasted discussing topics that aren’t relevant to ongoing projects or that don’t help the team meet its goals. When you leverage a collaborative meeting agenda instead, you’ll have predetermined talking points and goals that help move your projects forward. 

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Meetings go over time

Meetings go over time when there’s no one keeping tabs on how much time each talking point is taking. And when calls are frequently going over their scheduled timeframes, this delays future events on employee calendars and can also detriment their work-life balance. Meeting productivity software can automatically track your time spent in meetings and notify you when your meeting window is ending soon.

Meetings have too many people in them

If you’re finding it difficult to come to an agreement during a meeting, it might be because your calls have too many people in them. This often occurs when teams aren’t sure what the plan for the meeting is or the roles that each attendee is meant to have during the call. 

Meetings go off-topic

Even if your team is making use of a meeting agenda in every call, it’s possible to get off track. A meeting productivity software will always be reminding your team of the meeting’s goals through a shared collaboration space. Having talking points and objectives and key results (OKRs) in a shared area makes it easy to stay on topic and choose high-priority conversation points.

Meetings lack accountability

What are your team members expected to do after each call? How do they find out about their responsibilities assigned during the meeting? If you’re not clearly assigning action items to each meeting participant or you’re not tracking them in a central place, you run the risk of forgetting what activities were meant to happen. For HR leaders, Fellow can help foster a culture of accountability, which is important when documenting employee performance.

Meetings lack participation

In large meetings like company town halls, it can be more difficult to generate meeting engagement—but it is possible! If you’re finding that your team isn’t participating as actively as you’d like, it’s worth considering supplemental meeting tools that can give you ideas on how to generate better employee engagement or collect feedback for meeting adjustments that will make employees more motivated to join the conversation! 

Attendees come unprepared

A reason why your meetings might go over time or lack effective decision-making is because employees simply don’t know what to expect ahead of each call. A meeting productivity software like Fellow can organize your meeting agenda, notes, and action items in one place so that teams know how to prepare for the conversation. It can also offer guidance for hosts who aren’t sure how to structure the call! 

Your team has too many meetings

Even meeting-heavy roles like sales don’t need as many calls as you’d think. Getting some time back into your team members’ calendars can help them find deep focus time to finish their deliverables with higher quality. And reducing your team’s overall meeting time by up to 16% with Fellow can have huge budget savings on human capital costs, too! 

8 ways to seamlessly implement a new meeting productivity software

• Communicate the value of the tool to your team
• Provide a demo of how the tool works
• Invite team members to demo the tool
• Sign your team up for training sessions
• Set up the necessary integrations
• Have a point of contact
• Track the tool’s success
• Document the implementation steps

1Communicate the value of the tool to your team

It’s important to get buy-in from the team that will be using the meeting productivity tool. Communicating your reasons for purchasing the software will help them see the value that it will bring to the company. Better yet, you can generate buy-in from your team by showing them the specific solutions that this tool brings to their unique roles, such as how it can eliminate known friction on a specific team-wide call, for example. It’s important to ask your team about any concerns at this point so you can address them as soon as possible. 

2Provide a demo of how the tool works

Giving a demo of the tool is a great way to get buy-in from any team members who are more visual learners or who are hesitant about adopting the new technology. For team members who aren’t as confident working with new software tools, the demo is the perfect place to show how easy it is to navigate. Remember to show your team the specific features that are going to be most valuable to their roles so they know that the tool is relevant and useful for them.

3Invite team members to demo the tool

The next step when implementing the meeting productivity software is to get your team some hands-on time with it! This is important for kinesthetic learners to get a good feel for the platform. Having some practical experience with the software can bring more confidence to your team about how useful it will be. It’s likely that your team will think of a lot more questions and concerns about the software’s functionality at this stage, so be prepared to address those points as they arise.

4Sign your team up for training sessions

Training sessions are a helpful part of any onboarding experience to a new software platform. Even if your team is confident in using the basic functionalities already, training sessions with a product expert can allow your employees to learn new ways of using the product. They’ll likely learn how to use the tool more efficiently too like setting up automation, leveraging AI, or integrating the software with the rest of your tech stack. Get started with one of these free and short tutorials from Fellow, for example.

5Set up the necessary integrations

A high-quality meeting productivity software will have plenty of integrations to connect the tool to the rest of your business systems. For example, Fellow’s Chrome extension makes your meeting agendas available directly from any call hosted in the Google Chrome web browser! Take a look at what other integrations Fellow offers that work seamlessly with the tools you already love.

6Have a point of contact

The point of contact (PoC) is the designated go-to person within your company for addressing any questions or concerns that your employees have. The PoC should be a product expert themselves, so it’s a good idea for this person to participate in all of the training sessions offered by the meeting productivity platform. As questions roll in, your PoC can also create a centralized knowledge base with all of the questions and answers received so far. Then, as your team gets onboarded into the platform they can first reference the knowledge base to see if their question already has an answer prepared. 

7Track the tool’s success

Chief financial officers (CFOs) love to see the return on investment (ROI) of company-wide purchases. For this reason, Fellow has meeting analytics built-in to the platform to make seeing the product’s usage and results easy! As your meetings become more productive over time, you can calculate the ROI of your meetings and see how it improves. Make sure to frequently collect feedback about the meeting tool’s implementation so you can track any qualitative success metrics as well. 

8Document the implementation steps 

It’s a good idea to document the onboarding steps and any tips for working with the meeting productivity platform. This will help new hires to get easily set up and to start using the tool as well as support employees who need a bit of support down the line. If you’ve received any insights from your team about how to improve the usage or implementation of the meeting productivity software, you should include these insights in your documentation, too. These employee-offered tips are extra helpful for detailing the implementation of the platform specifically as it relates to your company’s operations.

How to seamlessly implement Fellow into your team

Fellow is a meeting productivity software that encourages teams to collaborate in meetings more effectively. For Briq, a financial analytics software, the implementation of Fellow allowed them to see significant improvements in employee productivity by having a centralized place to organize goals and meeting minutes. Their implementation manager, Samantha Wilson, found that making use of training sessions was the most helpful way to encourage company-wide adoption, saying, 

“After I completed the one-on-one training session with Lacey from Fellow, my team and I can now collaborate on the same meeting note, and everyone is using it heavily. I didn’t realize our previous process needed improvement until Fellow came along.”

Parting advice

As you start thinking about your plan for implementing a new meeting productivity software, you’ll realize there’s a lot to consider! The most important elements to remember are focusing on getting buy-in from your employees, collecting feedback frequently from users, and ensuring your team is well-equipped with the knowledge needed to make effective use of the platform. As you go, remember that you can also reach out to your meeting productivity software vendor at any time if you have any questions or concerns!