Meetings can decide whether a company is successful or not. Good communication is a decisive success factor, especially in today's digital and remote-first environment.

Ineffective meetings are one of the most dreaded time wasters, particularly for technical staff and strategic managers. Focused and strategic work is made more difficult. However, not only internal parties suffer from a bad meeting culture, but also customers and partners. If meetings are not carried out efficiently and professionally, collaboration is often difficult.

Companies therefore benefit directly and holistically from a healthy and effective meeting culture.

Of course, in addition to methodology, we also need the right tools, especially in an increasingly digital and home office world.

In this blog post, we present a best practice in dealing with meetings and show options for Atlassian Confluence as a meeting tool.

In addition, we learn Meetical Meetings for Confluence know, an app for Outlook and Google Calendar integration from the Swiss company Meetical, which transforms Confluence into a professional meeting management system.

All together helps to conduct remote meetings and classic meetings effectively and efficiently. This also leaves room for a joint (virtual) coffee chat and relaxed exchange.

Frustration and success factor meetings

Who doesn't know it...

• Lack of preparation for meetings and the feeling of just wasting time?
• Lack of involvement?
• Non-transparent and unreliable distribution of tasks?
• No insight into cross-team meetings and decisions?

Meetings can be one of the biggest efficiency and motivation killers in companies.

The consequences are high employee turnover as well as disagreements with partners and customers.

On the other hand, however, the most successful companies in the world are all known for maintaining an extremely effective meeting culture, such as Amazon with its notorious Silent Meetings, or Tesla's meeting practices, but also the funding of so-called One-on-one meetings, an exchange between different roles in the company, as practiced at von Bento.

How do meetings become successful?

Best practices and the right tools help keep meetings effective and employees don't get frustrated — they stay engaged!

Meeting best practices that lead to success

It is recently known and described in literature that important factors for successful meetings are:

• preparation; set a clear goal and create an agenda, at the latest at the start of the meeting.
• Provide opportunities for everyone subscriber Get involved, even before the meeting. (Tip: Avoid mere viewers in meetings)
• Transparent, reliable and written scores and distribution of tasks.
• Agenda and results of meetings about the group of participants Share and make accessible.

Recommended at this point is the book “The Surprising Science of Meetings” by Steven G. Rogelberg, one of the most renowned scientists on the subject of meetings. Here, too, the points mentioned are mentioned as important success factors.

^{The combination of methods, best practices, and tools results in effective meetings.}

To implement these points, Confluence, Atlassian's wiki and collaboration tool, an ideal basis for preparing, running and documenting meetings.

As a best practice in dealing with the so-called Confluence Meeting Notes Let's proceed as follows:

(1) For each meeting, a Confluence page is created in advance and this is linked directly in the appointment or in the invitation.

The Meeting Notes page is therefore available to all participants easy and fast discoverable.

(2) The result is a central agenda that can be worked on together and is also discussed in advance.

• Can all points be clarified in advance? So much the better!
• Is there no agenda available at the start? Then creating them is the first point. An ad-hoc agenda is also popular with retrospectives in Scrum and is extremely efficient.

(3) In addition, in Confluence Meeting, pages can also be very easily shared and made accessible beyond the group of participants. But at the same time, the software's sophisticated rights system allows the desired level of confidentiality and privacy to be maintained — from only visible to myself, to company-wide.

(4) In Confluence, the agenda, important results and decisions are therefore documented on the same page, action items are defined and responsible persons are assigned for them.

^{A typical Confluence page with meeting notes - template with date, participants, goal, agenda and action items}

The software offers numerous macros and countless other apps for expansion.

The so-called “tasks” (also known as action items) are a practical macro in this place. They are suitable for quickly and easily creating, assigning and assigning tasks with a due date. A task report macro then makes it possible, for example, to display all overdue tasks in a series of meetings.

Manual process seeks automation

In practice, the best practices described often prove to be an additional, manual step and are unfortunately often neglected or forgotten — especially in intensive project phases.

Find the right space in Confluence, choose the right template and main page, copy information and participants from the calendar... Tedious work, often simply too time-consuming.

This sometimes means that meetings are not adequately prepared. Pages are lost. There is a lack of written results and an opaque distribution of tasks leads to frustration and, in the worst case, to the failure of a project.

One app for Confluence that helps to promote the implementation of best practice and the use of meeting notes is the Meetical Meeting Management App.

Manage meeting notes faster, easier and virtually automatically

The meeting management app “Meetical Meetings” helps to consistently implement and automate meeting best practices and enormously simplifies the use of Confluence Meeting Notes.

Meetical automates repetitive tasks associated with preparing, running, and documenting meetings.

The extension is based on Atlassian Confluence and therefore works very well with Jira.

Disclaimer here: Meetical was originally started as a side project, by Lukas Gotter, author of this article and, until recently, an Atlassian Consultant at Swarmit. The app is the winner of Atlassian's CodeGeist 2020 competition, and is now also co-financed by the brand-new Atlassian Ventures Fund.

Implement best practice effectively

With Meetical for Confluence, the described meeting best practice can be implemented very effectively.

We can create a meeting agenda, preparation tasks, and notes for any meeting in no time — right from our calendar!

It is therefore no longer an extra step to send the meeting invitation and create a page. This is because this is often postponed until later and forgotten. That is why the corresponding page and agenda are missing or are not easy to find.

But even just before the meeting, there is often no time to create a decent page for collaboration in 2-3 minutes. With the app, this ad-hoc action can be carried out in just a few seconds.

By the way, we at Swarmit also use the app for our internal Team Meeting To which all Atlassian consultants come together weekly for an exchange of experiences and important updates.

^{Swarmit Weekly Meeting Template - Each Atlassian Consultant receives their slot to freely tell what is happening and is planned. - Participants and meeting information are taken from the calendar and linked with Meetical.}

Of course, they also use the technology to document meetings in which we are only participants, e.g. for arrangements with customers and suppliers. Important information can thus be shared directly with our colleagues.

External parties may also appreciate receiving a standardized PDF export of the most important points as a follow-up.

Direct integration of tools into calendars and meeting invitations

Due to the tight integration of Meetical into the calendar, this important step for preparation and documentation is integrated directly into the appointment calendar like a kind of reminder.

For Google Calendar Is there a Confluence Chrome Extension available. It is available on the Chrome Web Store.

For Microsoft Outlook There is a special calendar Confluence Outlook add-in available. This can be installed via the Microsoft AppSource App Store.

^{Meetical offers a Chrome extension for Google Calendar and an Outlook add-in for Microsoft users.}

In addition, Meetical also comes with a in Confluence integrated calendar therefore. The calendar shows appointments from Google Calendar, or Outlook Calendar directly in Confluence.

The user can also create meeting pages from the integrated calendar and quickly find existing pages.

Don't lose valuable time during meetings

Starting a meeting on time and getting the full attention of the meeting leader is another important success factor.

In meetings, the first few minutes often elapse with admin tasks. A big mistake that can demotivate participants, as is also revealed in a scientific study in the previously mentioned book by Dr. Steve Rogelberg.

With Meetical, participants and managers no longer waste time copying content or manually creating meeting pages. Information such as date, location, participants and participation status is automatically transferred from the calendar and remains up to date. — All participants therefore benefit from reliable, consistent and retrievable meeting minutes.

Meeting and calendar entry are automatically linked together, which gives all participants direct access and promotes active participation of all participants.

The app also brings other additional Meeting Templates with you for team meetings, tactical meetings, strategic meetings, 1-on-1 meetings and a few more. Templates for Scrum events, such as reviews, should follow.

In addition, we can also make our own Meeting Templates create and use meeting macros to display content from the calendar in Confluence.

Communicate results efficiently after the meeting

Confluence makes it very easy to create tasks or action items and also to provide them with a due date and a responsible person.

^{Task report in Confluence with an overview of all tasks in an area or section, e.g. from a series of meetings. Can also be integrated directly on the meeting page for more visibility.}

The next time the team meets, these tasks can be completed with the help of a Task Reports be followed up. Have all tasks from previous meetings been completed? One of the best questions to ask at the start of every meeting.

If a simple to-do list is no longer enough, teams can quickly and easily also use tools such as Jira and Trello integrate with Confluence and thus continue to manage more complex tasks simply and clearly.

Completely automate the workflow for meeting series

But Meetical goes one step further. For meeting series, the Meetical app automatically creates a main page per series, under which all appointments are stored in a uniform and structured manner.

In addition, however, the process of creating a new meeting page and linking it to the calendar can fully automated become! For example, we can always create a new page 1 week in advance and link it to the calendar. For this purpose, Meetical offers the option of defining for each series whether and how many days in advance new meeting pages should be created for a series appointment.

This means that a meeting page is always available in good time for every appointment in the series.

All meeting participants and their participation status are automatically recorded so that everyone stays up-to-date.

Participants will of course be notified of changes to the site, e.g. new agenda suggestions, comments, etc. from Confluence.

Latest feature (since November 3rd!) is the option to edit the list of participants and, for example, adjust the participation status or hide a participant. Very useful for professional PDF exports, which can then be sent to external participants.

conclusion

Meetings can be a time waster, especially for technical implementers and strategic managers, but they are undoubtedly an important part of our modern working life, both in a new remote-first context and in traditional office life.

In order to avoid frustration and inefficiency, meetings should be prepared collaboratively, with transparent results, available information across teams and reliable distribution of tasks.

The best practices for preparing meetings and mastering the tools are important skills that all colleagues should have. Documenting the results and making results easily accessible within the company makes an important contribution to a healthy and successful meeting culture.

Confluence helps to create a knowledge base for meetings and to make this knowledge easily and accessible beyond the group of participants.

With the Meeting Notes app from Meetical Teams benefit from seamless calendar integration, strong process simplification and automation. These are important contributions to the successful preparation and documentation of meetings.

Together, it all leads to effective and efficient meetings, better communication, more exchange of knowledge, more time for focused work and ultimately more success in projects.

With this in mind: I wish you all exciting, productive and effective meetings!

Confluence and the Meetical app can you test for free.

Get started right away?

Atlassian Marketplace link for Cloud app Meetical Meetings for Confluence.

Note for Data center customers: Beta available! Please feel free to contact us!

Interested in a demo?

Swarmit helps them to set up their Confluence to meet the needs of users and expand them in a targeted manner.

We would be happy to show you the benefits of structured meetings with Meetical in a personal demo. Please contact us via the contact form.

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