Why your company should have a rude meeting culture

You know the feeling. Someone has just scheduled an unnecessary meeting on your calendar, and your entire morning’s productivity is thrown off. You should decline the meeting and keep focused, but you don’t want to be rude or raise eyebrows, so you politely accept.

The issue is that while most meetings aren’t necessary, there are always 5-10 valuable minutes found in each one. So you waste 25-50 minutes just for the small amount of time that actually matters to your work. That’s a big oof.

What's worse is that this is happening more and more. In fact, according to research done at Microsoft, the number of weekly meetings has increased by 153% since 2020.

Now, maybe you’re the CEO and feel a bit more comfortable declining meetings, but your team probably doesn’t feel so empowered. You’re creating a polite meeting culture that sucks away your team’s focus and translates into an average $25,000 per person per year. It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

In stark contrast to that, the benefits of declining meetings are clear:

• 86% of people say they work more effectively when they have longer periods of uninterrupted time to focus on their work.
• 84% of people say their productivity would improve if they were empowered to skip unnecessary meetings.
• 70% of people say their job satisfaction would improve if they were empowered to skip unnecessary meetings.

All this data confirms what we all already know. Attending mostly useless meetings has become part of the status quo, and everyone hates it.

So what now?

At this point, you’re probably nodding your head along in agreement and annoyance because you know you’ve got limited time before your next meeting. So how do we change? How do we protect our company’s productivity and create a culture where people can stay informed and engage without taking away focused work time?

Luckily there’s a better way, and it starts with three simple principles to create a better meeting culture:

1. Record your meetings. Make sure there's an account of what was talked about. Video is the best way to get a high-fidelity and complete picture of the discussion.
2. Keep your meetings small. Invite only the most necessary contributors and keep everyone else informed by making the recording available to your team.
3. Encourage asynchronous attendance. Your team not only needs to be able to get the information they need faster, but they also need to be able to collaborate on meeting recordings asynchronously. This is especially important for people that work remotely or in other time zones!

Rewatch makes it easy

While these principles seem simple, they can feel daunting to incorporate into your company. That’s where Rewatch comes in. We purpose-built the platform to help your team reduce meeting load and stay focused on real work without sacrificing awareness about what’s happening.

Step 1: Automatically record your meetings from your calendar

Rewatch connects to your Google or Outlook calendars and automatically records and transcribes your meetings. Whether your team uses Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or even a mix of all three, Rewatch has your back.

Keep your meetings smaller and use Rewatch to automatically distribute the transcript out to stakeholders who don’t really need to be there in person.

Because everything is transcribed, Rewatch turns your meetings into a searchable knowledge base rather than a black hole of content that no one can access.

Step 2: Highlight your video to help your team focus on what’s most important

Your videos contain a lot of valuable information, but finding the key insights in long recordings can be challenging. Rewatch allows you to watch videos at 2x speed or highlight the most important moments, so it's easy for everyone on your team to get up to speed.

Highlights allow your videos to be super easy to navigate with more digestible bits of information, saving your team time from scrubbing endless hours of video to find what’s relevant.

Step 3: Continue the conversation

Rewatch allows your team to comment directly on a video’s transcript and continue collaborating around a meeting long after the in-person meeting time is over. Emojis and @mentions are readily available.

You can also use tags in Rewatch to organize your videos by topic and enable your team to find and get more context from related content. Our Zapier integration makes it even easier to continue the conversation in the places where your team already works.

Our Slack integration makes it even easier to stay on top of all this activity by automatically notifying them about highlights and videos directly in their Slack channels. Also, you have complete control over what is sent and where.

Bonus: Replace meetings altogether with Series

Improving on your meetings with Rewatch is a no-brainer. If you want to bring your team’s productivity to the next level, consider using Rewatch Series, a new way to collaborate without a meeting. Series are short-form video feeds that can replace meetings for status updates, product demos, leadership comms, and more.

Want to learn more about how Rewatch can save your company hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on wasted meetings while allowing your team to work more asynchronously? Get in touch! We’re ready to help.