Cogi’s benefits are nearly as numerous as our customer’s diverse uses. They use it to: record phone calls, take notes (like a virtual assistant), record conference calls and meetings, transcribe conference calls and meetings, record interviews, and share it all with their teams, colleagues or podcasts, and more. How will Cogi help you mutiply the value of your conversations?

Meetings are an inevitable – if not essential – part of the workflow for many functions in business: brainstorming, project management status, product requirements reviews, design reviews, document reviews, staff meetings, sales status reviews, board meetings, strategy meetings, and many more. Meetings are expensive investments – for you and your team and the company you work for. But meetings often get a bad ‘rap’ in terms of productivity: They present a challenge in extracting the maximum value from what is essentially a verbal conversation.

If you take a moment to calculate the cost of your investment in meetings, you might be surprised how significant it is. Now try to calculate the return. What is the output? Thoughts, ideas, action items, common understanding, etc. captured in each person’s memory, and some quickly jotted notes. This is your “return” or value you get from a meeting. Can your “Return on Meetings” (ROM) be improved? This post explores this problem and some features Cogi has to help you multiply that “R.O.M.” and give your team’s performance a huge boost.

The cost of a meeting

First of all, most people agree that meetings are a significant investment in human capital.  Check out this meeting cost calculator that calculates the cost of your meeting based on number of attendees, length, and pay rate of attendees.  For example, if you have 4 executives in room for an hour at a “burdened cost” of $100/hour, that’s a $400/hour meeting.

Moreover, there’s also the “opportunity cost” of the time you and your team spend in a meeting, when they could be doing, ahem, “other work”.

The problem: Capturing value from verbal conversations

The value of a meeting is derived from the common understanding of content of the meeting as it is taken away by each participant, and accurately relayed to others and transformed into action. The content could be ideas, technical details, decisions, status, action items, anything you can talk about in a meeting.

Ah, but how is all this value captured? That’s where things get a bit less precise.  The thing about meetings is that communication is primarily verbal. Usually, the note pad is the tool of choice. But if you look at a prototypical meeting and its related events as a sort of workflow, you can identify the points of “Loss”.

Key “points of loss” in the typical meeting workflow:

1)      The Distraction Factor: Trying to take thorough notes and participate during a meeting is distracting at best, and impossible for most. Focus= productivity.

2)      Delay of game: Typically the recap occurs 3 – 12 hours or more after the meeting. Often, items that weren’t captured get forgotten.

3)      Selective hearing: The note taker tries to capture what’s important to him, but often things that were valuable to others get missed.

4)      Amplification of misinformation: Ever played the game of telephone? Misunderstanding coming out of a meeting can be like that but with cost of the misinformation multiplying with each “pass it on”.

5)      The Meeting II: Lastly, there is the possibility you may have to re-hash the same meeting to those who couldn’t attend.

So how much loss – whether lost content, or lost productivity trying to relay it — results from meetings? According to an informal survey I did on the Project Management Networking Group on LinkedIn, the response was almost unanimous: “considerable”, “significant”, “huge”,  “heaps of verbal gems that get missed” – in other words, a lot!

The bottom line is, much – sometimes most – of a meeting’s content gets lost along the way – either not captured or relayed – or its misunderstood and acted upon incorrectly.

Next episode: How to solve this problem and maximize your Return on Meetings (ROM) using Cogi…

Maximizing ROM Part 2: Your Meeting on Cogi

With Cogi, a meeting can be a productive, focused encounter where everyone contributes and gets an accurate, sharable set of searchable notes and dialog.  Here’s how it works:

Two ways to use conference phone to capture meetings:

1)      With a laptop: If you bring your laptop to the meeting, use the Cogi software to start a Meeting Mode recording using your conference phone. Follow the steps here to use your phone as a recorder, capturing the recording on our secure server.

2)      Without laptop (or when your conference phone doesn’t have a direct dial line):

1. Call in to the Cogi Access Line (415) 691-4045,
2. Login by phone: Enter the phone number you registered with, and the PIN code that you received in your Welcome email.
3. Recording will begin automatically (tip: you can press the # key to skip the prompts)

(Note: This discussion assumes your meeting is all in-person, where everyone is in the room. For meetings when you have one or more people on the phone, use Cogi in calling mode to place the call from your conference phone to the other end  - either a person or conference bridge. See our tutorial here www.cogi.com/help.)

Highlight the high points

Once the call is underway, With the Highlighting and Transcription features, the meeting leader makes a simple gesture to flag an important point in the conversation, and that portion will be transcribed into a verbatim text note. You can decide how much gets transcribed several ways:

1)      A Highlight – this is a 30-seconds of audio around that moment – so the highlight ‘back up’ 15 seconds – that way you don’t miss anything – and continues another 15 seconds forward. This highlighted audio is then sent to be transcribed. Our transcription turnaround time goal is next business day, but its usually faster (often the same day).

2)      Lock highlighting on to get a transcript of any length (until you turn it off)

3)      Transcribe the entire meeting: After the meeting is done, hangup the phone, and the software will show options to transcribe the call, and/or to share it.

Share the wealth (of notes and audio!)

Cogi provides a feature called Share that lets you send a link to view and hear the meeting online. Login to your Cogi Portfolio, open the desired Call (we call them calls – even if they’re just meeting mode), and click Share. Enter the email addresses and a note, and Send. Voila – everyone on the same page!

The recipients don’t have to be subscribed in order to view and hear the call – they’ll automatically receive their very own “guest account” login.

In conclusion, in-person meeting are an extremely efficient way to collaborate in many cases – even compared to trying to do the same via IM/email/text chat back and forth: Most people can talk a LOT faster than they can type, and ‘broadcast’ (everyone can hear you) is built-in. Our goal with Cogi is to help you capture the valuable content created during these significant ‘investments’ in meeting time, so you can make the most of it with your team.