Your Company's Secret Weapon?

For some companies, this tool isn’t seen as a valuable asset while for many others, notes are viewed though a less-than-flattering lens — as ineffective, time-consuming, an activity that delivers a low ROI. The problem is regardless of how a company values notes, action items, key takeaways and other insights that arise rarely see the light of day and remain inaccessible to those who weren’t in the room.

Whether speaking to customers or convening internally, meeting notes can reveal valuable insights about your business. While these insights are critical to various teams, the information is often buried in notebooks, CRM software or email exchanges.

The process and decisions that surround company meetings are key components of team collaboration and communication, but many organizations fail to effectively gather and leverage those insights, and as a result, important information and opportunities fall through the cracks.

Whether furiously typing away or rapidly scribbling in a notebook, meeting notes — when properly utilized — can be the most crucial element to creating and sustaining business success. These records are of limited value if only one individual or a small team has access, and because every gathering can result in items added to your organization’s to-do list, forward-thinking companies need to consider the use of meeting notes as their secret weapon to align their business.

How many times have you left a meeting confident that you know what’s going on only to have your memory go fuzzy, forgetting next steps within a few hours or by the next day? You know decisions were made, but you now need to turn those into action items. When meetings deliver a lack of clarity and indecision, poor meeting notes are commonly the culprit.

The solution is effective record keeping and a business-wide process for capturing, storing and sharing insights and plans. Your team is then able to crystallize conversations, revealing what was decided and why those selections were made while identifying the concepts worth remembering or sharing. When meetings, insights and outcomes are leveraged in this way, these professional gatherings transform from “the ultimate hold-out against the digitization of working life” to productive sessions that offer teams a sense of accomplishment.

Transcripts are an effective way to discover what your clients are thinking and saying, and an awesome means of keeping teams connected across an entire enterprise. Team alignment and engagement comes from a common understanding of what matters most to a business, and therefore, insights derived from meetings should be shared and made available to keep everyone connected and on the same page.

And with conferences seen by countless companies as unnecessary and expensive, the ability to share meeting notes with people who did not attend can help entire organizations stay informed on critical outcomes while significantly reducing overhead costs. Advances in note-taking technology ensure employees no longer need to sit through get-togethers just to remain informed.

Take productivity software company, Hugo as an example. Hugo has developed a meeting-notes platform that allows teams to stay connected and aligned with colleagues and customers in real time.

With Hugo, users have the ability to record and share meeting notes while giving action items, key takeaways and other insights practical value. Hugo integrates your team’s notes with all of their favorite apps, including Slack, Salesforce, Trello and many others, to save time while increasing information sharing across the entire enterprise.

After making decisions, identifying next steps and recording every insight, staying aligned is much easier. While everyone has their own system of recording and organizing notes, finding the right productivity tools, including meeting note software such as Hugo, can transform meeting notes into your company’s secret weapon.

Darren Chait is a co-founder and COO of Hugo, the meeting note platform that keeps your team connected with what your customers are thinking and saying. It enables fast-moving teams to make meeting insights shareable and actionable in their existing tools.