5 Reasons Why You Should Use Stormboard To Have Fewer Meetings

In theory, meetings are meant to make the workplace more efficient — it’s all about sharing ideas, collaboration, and increasing productivity.

But, the reality is that they tend to be a terrible use of time, a waste of resources, and can even stall productivity.

Here are five reasons why you need to hold fewer meetings, and how Stormboard can help.

1. There is often no new information shared

A lot of meetings tend to be about sharing information across teams — basically getting everyone on the same page. But, a lot of the time this information is already known or could have been shared in a more effective way.

Stormboard is a real-time, ongoing collaboration tool that allows all employees to be connected whether they are in the office, traveling, or working remotely. This means that you can easily cut back or even eliminate status update meetings, as you can make sure all the information that you would communicate with them is shared in your Storm.

2. They can be replaced by another form of communication

Is the information that you need to convey possible to share in a way that does not involve gathering 50 people in a room? A lot of the time what might take half an hour in a meeting could be covered in an email that would take you 15 minutes to write.

But, how do you know that everyone has read the email, and what if you have to assign tasks to different members of your team?

This is where Stormboard comes in. All communication becomes centralized in your Storm, which means that you don’t have to send emails back and forth constantly just to make sure that everyone has read and understands what they are responsible for.

With Stormboard, you can assign tasks and due dates to different employees within your Storm and get feedback on ideas with comments or voting.

3. They are usually inefficient

Many meetings are not prepared ahead of time or don’t have a set agenda, which means that time is often wasted due to small talk, set-up, or trying to keep everyone on task. Meetings need to have strict goals, direction, and agendas before they are held in order to ensure that time is not wasted.

With Stormboard, you can set up your agenda and prepare for your meeting well before the actual meeting date. You can also have attendees review material ahead of time, or even start contributing ideas before you are ever in a room together.

Stormboard not only makes your meetings more efficient, but it can also shorten them drastically — time is money!

4. Meetings take time away from actual work

When your team is sitting in a meeting, they are not actually getting any real work done. Taking notes they probably won’t look at ever again, or scrolling through Facebook is not the most productive use of their time.

According to an article on Inc.com:

“Even a thirty-minute meeting can have drastic negative impacts on a company’s productivity. If you hold a thirty-minute meeting and you have thirty employees which attend, that accounts for a loss of 15 hours of work. That’s almost two full business days.”

If your meeting isn’t planned properly or is just repeating information that employees already know, that is a huge waste of time and money!

Stormboard allows employees to collaborate from their own office, when it is the most convenient for them, cutting down the need to gather them in a boardroom and pull them out of their workday.

5. They are not the best way to come up with great ideas

Meetings usually involve someone standing at the front of the room — a facilitator — running through a set agenda, or trying to get meeting attendees to brainstorm new ideas. The problem is that this traditional form of collaboration is not actually great for, well, collaboration.

What tends to happen is that people with great ideas are often too intimidated to contribute, or don’t want to interrupt a more outspoken colleague to share them with the team. This means that there are potentially hundreds of great ideas locked in the minds of employees who don’t have an environment conducive to collaboration readily available to them.

One of the best things about Stormboard is that all members of a Storm can contribute at the same time. You don’t have to wait for Barb from accounting to stop talking or work up the courage to throw your idea out there.

All you have to do is type that idea out on a sticky note and hit enter. It’s that easy. And in seconds everyone can read your idea, comment on it, vote on it, and even connect it with other ideas.

Even better, you don’t have to wait for a meeting to share your great ideas! You can add them to your Storm whenever inspiration hits — on any device!

Get Started

Are you ready to start having fewer meetings? Create your free Stormboard account now!

Keep Reading