Even though meetings are crucial for teams and organizations to function smoothly, they can sometimes be inefficient and hamper productivity. Online meetings are often plagued with phrases like “Sorry I’m late,” “I can’t hear you,” and “Can you repeat that last part?”.
However, with the right tools, staying focused despite these distractions is not hard. Below are the best tools to ensure optimum efficiency for your online meetings.
Schedule Like a Pro
Planning and scheduling meetings can be overwhelming, given that you have to take everybody’s availability into account. Figuring out the best time for everyone is especially challenging with remote workers across the globe. Fortunately, some apps canmake planning meetings less of a hassle:
1.Calendly.com
Calendly is an intuitive scheduling app that helps prevent double bookings. The app allows you to sync multiple calendars, ensuring that people only see time slots that are free and bookable. With this, you can disclose your availability while keeping the underlying details of your meetings private.
Like Calendly, Cal also considers multiple calendars to display free time slots. Additionally, Cal offers a Teams option for a fee, where you’re able to add other members to your team. This is ideal for booking team meetings, as it considers multiple people’s availabilities.
Magical is a Chrome extension that not only can sync calendars but is a full-on virtual meeting assistant. Magical can plan meetings, create booking links, and ensure you never miss another meeting. The Magical extension seamlessly integrates with your Google Chrome browser to show you exactly when and what your next meeting is.
Have Crystal Clear Calls
Virtual meetings rely heavily on voice clarity. In the comfort of our homes, noises such as those from kids, pets, appliances, and traffic are bound to be present. But there are some methods you may try to reduce these noises during your calls:
4. In-App Noise Suppression
Many popularonline meeting appslike Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Discord have built-in noise suppression features. With this, you should be able to suppress most of the background noise without the need for additional apps.
Krisp is one of the most popular noise-suppression apps. It reduces background noise and improves the audio you hear by filtering out background noise from other meeting participants. Krisp is easy to set up on most devices and seamlessly integrates with most meeting software.
6.Noise Blocker
Noise Blocker is another excellent app for noise suppression. This app allows you to adjust the intensity and threshold of noise suppression, which is perfect if you prefer to keep in some ambient noise. The only drawback is that Noise Blocker is only available for Windows 10 and above.
Automate Your Meeting Notes
Recording parts of the meeting or noting important details during a call can be tedious. You might also miss out on the discussion at hand while jotting notes. Here are a few apps that canoutsource your note-taking with AI, thus allowing you to be fully present in your meetings:
Besides its top-notch noise suppression feature, Krisp can also provide excellent meeting transcriptions. If you already have Krisp set up for audio, it automatically creates meeting transcripts and notes and summarizes your call for you.
Although Magical does include a meeting calendar, that’s not all there’s to it. Magical can join your calls as a virtual assistant that takes notes and helps create agendas based on previous meetings. The AI Notetaker transcribes the calls in real-time and swiftly generates meeting summaries and next steps.
9.Supernormal
With the power of AI, Supernormal can record and transcribe meetings so that you can focus on the conversation. It can generate detailed notes, highlight key decisions, and document action items addressed during the meeting.
Make the Most of Your Meetings
The tools mentioned above can significantly improve the efficiency of your meetings. By using the appropriate apps and tools, you’ll see that creating a workflow and meeting environment perfectly catering to your needs is relatively easy. After all, no matter what you need, there’s an app for it!
These apps may be able to remove software-related blocks, but you should also consider how to make the most of these calls by creating a supportive environment for discussion.
