The remote working world is here to stay! But that means there are a lot more meetings held virtually, which can make it feel harder to gauge productivity since it’s less tangible than in an in-person meeting. Luckily, there are a ton of cool tools out there to help you take control of your meetings and even help manage them a lot more efficiently. We’ve put together some of the reasons we love meeting productivity software and 9 of the best tools that you should try in 2023!
- What is meeting productivity software?
- The benefits of meeting productivity software
- The best meeting productivity software in 2023
What is meeting productivity software?
When there’s so much to get done in a day, it’s tough to see your team members spending a lot of their time working on administrative tasks like moving documents, recording notes, or trying to find a calendar time that works for everyone’s schedule. Meeting productivity software helps to give you this time back. There’s a ton of technology out there that can help you automate most of your mundane, manual tasks, meaning your team can use this time to complete tasks that will actually help your business grow faster.
Run efficient meetings, come to a decision, and get back to work
Level up your meeting habits to boost engagement and productivity with a collaborative meeting agenda. Try a tool like Fellow!
The benefits of meeting productivity software
- Collaborative meeting agendas
- Productive notetaking
- Effective decision making
- Actionable tasks
- Task follow-up
- Decreased meeting costs
1Collaborative meeting agendas
Meeting agendas are such a great way to keep your calls organized and on time. Better yet, you can share your meeting agenda to the rest of the participants ahead of each call (ideally at least one business day in advance) so they can review it and come to the meeting fully prepared. Meeting guests might also want to add talking points or embed their presentations, which software allows them to do.
2Productive notetaking
A lot of people don’t realize the value of collaborating on meeting notes together. When you’re on a call and debating your way through a lot of big conversations, it helps to make the small things even easier. For example, with Fellow’s browser extension, you can have your notes right inside your video conference so you don’t need to waste time shuffling papers or browser tabs.
3Effective decision making
It’s estimated that each person will make up to 35,000 choices per day (some a lot bigger or smaller than others). Within every meeting there are not quite as many choices to make, but it can still get easily overwhelming. Bringing in tools to help present options, clarify goals, and take polls can help ease your decision-making process.
4Actionable tasks
Following each call, you should have a clear idea of the next steps that you and your team need to take. These are called your meeting’s action items. Over long and complex projects, you might find yourself losing track of progress on action items. A meeting productivity software can help you track items in a list or calendar format, and even notify responsible parties when the action items’ deadlines are approaching!
5Task follow-up
Sometimes meetings go a bit longer than planned. In these cases, you might not cover all of your talking points. Fellow gets this, and they’ve got a special feature to carry over incomplete talking points and action items into the next meeting—automatically! Not only does this feature remind your team of unfinished projects, but it also minimizes how much time you spend on admin work.
6Decreased meeting costs
Meetings can be one of your organization’s biggest expenses! The cost of your meeting gets calculated by adding up the hourly wages of all attendees. To reduce this cost, employ a meeting productivity software that shortens your overall meeting time, automatically sends post-meeting surveys and follow-ups after the meeting, and ensures you have a stable connection throughout the entire call.
Unsure how much money your meetings are costing you? Try out Fellow’s Meeting Cost Calculator here!
The best meeting productivity software in 2023
1Fellow
Fellow is a meeting management software that helps you automate many of the mundane tasks that are part of hosting a meeting. Whether you’re planning for a one-on-one or a large town hall, Fellow’s purpose is to help you identify your meeting’s goals, track action items, and document progress over time.
Key features:
- Create and share collaborative meeting agendas
- Automatically send feedback survey after the call
- Integrate notes directly into your video conference call
- View meeting analytics (for example, the total time spent in meetings)
Pricing:
- Free plan available!
- Paid plans start at $9 per user per month
2ClickUp
ClickUp is an all-around great automation platform to help make almost any project more efficient. For everything from brainstorming with virtual whiteboards to tracking campaign progress in dashboards, it’s an ideal everyday tool for busy teams.
Key features:
- Virtual whiteboard for brainstorming
- Abolility to upload and connect documents to projects
- Ability to track individual and team progress
- Built-in chat to collaborate with your team in real-time
- Many integrations to other productivity apps (including Fellow!)
Pricing:
- Free plan available!
- Paid plans start at $9 per user per month
3Google Meet
For anyone who’s looking for a free video-conferencing tool, Google Meet is one of the best! It integrates seamlessly into the rest of the Google products—like Calendar and Drive—so you can quickly schedule calls and share docs. It’s also quite fast and available on Google’s browser, so you don’t need to install any software. One negative, though, is that the free version doesn’t enable recording.
Key features:
- Ability to schedule meetings and share meeting links easily
- Easy access on the browser
- Ability to send reactions or raise your hand (new feature!)
- In-app chat function
- Screen sharing with other participants
- Easy integration with other plug-ins (like Fellow!)
Pricing
- Free, like most Google products!
- New option for Google One at $13.99 per month per account
4Zoom
Zoom is another popular video conferencing tool, and is used a lot by big organizations and educational institutions. On the free plan, it’s easy for anyone to attend calls and host short meetings. Paid plans enable teams to host webinars, register virtual event attendees, and record calls—making it a great tool for sales enablement, customer success, or marketing teams.
Key features:
- Access registration and attendance information
- Ability to record calls and access recordings at a later date
- Ability to send reactions and chat in-app
- Breakout rooms for splitting up groups
- “Host view” to hide attendees in webinars
- Easy Integration with many plug-ins (like Fellow!)
Pricing:
- Free Basic plan is available!
- Paid plans start at $200 per year per user
- Special pricing available for schools and enterprises
- Many add-ons and upgrades available
5HubSpot
Known for being one of the most powerful customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, HubSpot is definitely a productivity software that you should consider adopting in 2023. While its pricing does get quite expensive once you need more features, there are also usually numerous promotions or small business packages to leverage. Plus, with all the features it offers, HubSpot proves its worth pretty quickly.
Key features:
- Automate customer and lead data across marketing and sales teams
- Assign and manage customer support tickets
- Create, nurture, and close sales contracts
- Track website analytics
- Build and distribute marketing newsletters
- Integrate into the rest of your tech stack (including Fellow!)
Pricing:
- Select free tools available
- Paid plans start at $50 per month
6Fathom
Fathom is a fantastic all-in-one platform to help with reporting, forecasting, and analysis. This makes it a great tool for accountants or bookkeepers who are short on time and need to automate manual data entry and calculations. Better yet, Fathom’s pricing also makes it well-suited for any size of company!
Key features:
- Build financial reports from a library of templates
- Collaborate on reports with your team or clients
- Run analysis on cash flow, growth goals, profitability and more
- Run scenario-based and driver-based forecasting
- Consolidate across multiple currencies, systems, and budgets
Pricing:
- 14-day free trial available
- Paid plans start at $54 per month per company
7Lucid Meetings
Lucid Meetings is on a mission to make teams more productive through transformational training courses. The company prioritizes systematic approaches that work on both the individual and company level, helping your team become the most effective it can be. Lucid Meetings offers a mix of skill training courses and programs to suit individual needs of each customer, too.
Key features:
- Lots of free resources for learning productivity hacks
- Ability to book into both public and private sessions
- Custom workshop development
- At least 10 meeting rooms available
- Full application programming interface (API) access to install your own integrations
- Accessible on both desktop and mobile
Pricing:
- Paid plans start at $12.50 per meeting host
8Calendly
One of the biggest time-wasters is scrolling through a bunch of calendars just to find out that no one is available at the same time for the next month—or further! Calendly is an automated appointment scheduling platform that helps to solve this problem. Instead of endlessly searching for the next availability, Calendly presents you with times that work for everyone. Then, book the meeting right away and see it in your calendar in an instant.
Key features:
- Automatically generate a meeting link in the invite
- Set meeting descriptions
- Send meeting reminder and follow-up emails to all participants
- Offer meetings on a round-robin basis (ideal for inbound sales!)
Pricing:
- Free plan is available!
- Paid plan starts at $10 per seat per month
9Chanty
For remote teams, Chanty is an awesome way to collaborate in real time, from anywhere. As a Slack alternative, Chanty is a virtual messaging tool that allows teams to communicate and quickly action conversations. When there’s a new action item in a conversation, users can create a task and then track the completion of that task.
Key features:
- Engage in cross-team collaboration
- Share code-snippets with dev-friendly formatting
- Pin important and helpful resources to the top of the page
- Create action items out of asynchronous conversations
Pricing:
- Free plan is available!
- Paid plans start at $4 per user per month
Parting advice
More and more teams are moving into the digital space and staying there. The huge advantage to practicing as a remote or hybrid team is that you can begin to automate, track, and optimize a lot more efficiently! And many tools to help with this are either free, have a free trial, or are priced reasonably with small businesses in mind. It might take some trial and error to find the perfect tool for you, but we promise it’s worth it!
