3 Ways Unio Can Augment Your Meetings Apps

Have you ever had a colleague or manager who enjoyed meetings just a little too much? For them, every correspondence is a conference in the making. Even things that could easily be left to email or instant messaging.

Status update on an ongoing project? Better host a meeting. Need to ask a quick question? Meeting. Share a critical document?

MEETING.

The Problem with Virtual Meetings

Unfortunately, the shift to distributed work has done nothing to quell these meeting-obsessed individuals. If anything, it's made things worse. Through platforms like Zoom, people are hosting meetings more frequently than before the pandemic, with more people in attendance.

And remote workers lack a physical office where they can connect, unwind, and decompress.

What that ultimately means is that if your business isn't careful and doesn't host meetings sparingly, your employees are going to start to burn out. As it turns out, virtual meetings are almost more exhausting that regular meetings. And Zoom fatigue, as it's come to be named, is a very real thing.

To avoid killing both productivity and morale with your meetings, you'll want to do a few things.

• Be mindful of length. Generally speaking, no meeting should be longer than half an hour. Plan your meetings to be as efficient as possible, and make sure to address as much as possible beforehand.

• Cut the chaff. Don't default to meetings whenever there's an issue.Instead, you should only host a meeting under the following circumstances:

• You've exhausted all other alternatives.

• You have a clear objective in mind — ie. solving a problem, charting out a course of action, making a critical decision, etc.

• Offer an alternative. Your meeting app should not be your business's only means of communication and collaboration. Instead, you must provide remote staff with an effective means of connecting outside of meetings.

Achieving the above requires proper planning. However, equally important is deploying the right software. And that's where Unio comes in.

How Unio Can Help You Host More Effective Meetings

Centralize Your Updates

Unio's integrated newsfeed allows you to keep all your company announcements in one place, accessible to everyone in the organization. More importantly, because people can comment on newsfeed posts, it can also serve as a communication forum. Instead of hosting a meeting on a particular topic, you can simply make a newsfeed post and encourage people to discuss.

You can also leverage Unio's newsfeed to inform people of upcoming meetings and other critical events.

Help Your People Connect and Engage

In a traditional workplace, people can congregate by the water cooler or in the break room. They can get to know each other and build a rapport organically. In addition to helping people work together more effectively, this has the side effect of promoting and furthering your company's culture.

Distributed teams don't really have a water cooler to chat by, but Unio can be the next best thing. Through intuitive voice, video, text, and file sharing, people can connect, collaboratem and get to know one another outside their day-to-day. More importantly, Unio gives employees the opportunity to reach out directly to leadership with questions, comments, or concerns.

Establish a Forum for Post-Meeting Communication

What happens after a meeting is often every bit as crucial as the meeting itself.

What are the core takeaways? What about next steps? When should the next meeting be, if one is scheduled?

In the case of digital meetings, Unio provides the perfect forum for this follow-up. Just as you might use the integrated newsfeed to announce scheduled meetings, you can also use it for post-meeting discussion. Alternatively, you can simply set up a group chat with attendees and collect their feedback directly.

Unifying Your Communications Leads to Better Meetings

Especially now, meetings are a necessary evil. Virtual conferences don't just help us plan — they help us connect. With that said, video calls cannot be the only way your people keep in touch.

They need something beyond digital conference rooms. An application that lets them seamlessly and effortlessly connect with each other no matter where they are. A platform like Unio.