Meetings play a pivotal role in organizational collaboration, but manual scheduling and coordination eats up valuable time. Intelligent automation can help streamline Google Meet calls to boost productivity. This comprehensive guide explores various automation strategies and best practices to elevate video conferencing.
The Overwhelming Meeting Burden
Meetings carry massive coordination costs that hinder productivity. According to the Verizon 2022 Meeting and Collaboration Technology Report:
- 73% of employees spend over 4 hours per week just scheduling and attending meetings
- 42% say meetings are unproductive and wasteful
Excessive meetings waste time, but collaboration remains critical for organizational success. Intelligent automation can help reconcile this paradox by streamlining the busy work around meeting logistics.
Automation Eases the Meeting Burden
Automating various Google Meet workflows provides multiple benefits:
- Automate meeting scheduling across calendars to quickly find optimal times that work for everyone
- Automatically leverage meeting data from emails and other tools to instantly coordinate calls, record discussions, and organize relevant follow-ups without any manual work
- Give employees their time back by eliminating laborious coordination tasks, enabling more meaningful collaboration
Keep reading to explore specific examples of intelligent automation in action.
Automating Scheduling Across Calendars
Finding the perfect time to meet can mean a dozen energy-draining email threads copying in the various attendees and negotiating availability back-and-forth.
Intelligent automation solutions can monitor participants‘ calendars to identify open slots that work for everyone, drastically reducing scheduling complexity. For example, demos from leading vendors like x.ai and Cron show up to 90% scheduling time savings.
Once the optimal meeting time is identified automatically, automation can:
- Instantly create calendar invites for all participants
- Automatically generate a Google Meet meeting link
- Insert the conferencing details directly into the calendar entries
- Reduce the average scheduling effort per meeting to just seconds rather than hours
Productivity acceleration is profound. By coordinating schedules across siloed calendar tools, automation eliminates painful manual efforts so participants simply show up at the right virtual location at the designated time.
Automating Meeting Data Flows
Meetings often involve cross-functional teams relying on mulitple collaboration systems like email, instant messaging, CRMs, and project management tools. Manually transferring meeting-relevant data between all these disparate systems squanders hours.
Intelligent automation can instantly share meeting details across the various systems to keep relevant stakeholders aligned without any copying and pasting. For example, automation can:
- Watch enterprise collaboration systems like Slack or Teams for meeting-related keywords
- Automatically fetch the meeting invite details from Google Calendar
- Flow all necessary meeting info into CRMs, project managers, or help desk platforms
- Begin Google Meet recordings based on meeting start times and push completed videos into cloud storage locations
- Listen for committments made in meeting discussions and automatically create related tasks for owners in the appropriate tools
This eliminates disjointed workflows, seamlessly pushes meeting data anywhere it needs to flow, and ensures the right people have the context necessary for streamlined follow-up.
Automating Large Video Meetings
Public webinars, enterprise town halls, and other large video meetings often involve hundreds of attendees along with chat discussions and live Q&A. Manually monitoring and facilitating these massive events is extremely challenging.
Intelligent automation can listen to large meeting chats in real-time and:
- Route moderated questions into organized Q&A queues automatically
- Monitor raised hands or reactions to dynamically queue speakers
- Detect off-topic tangents and automatically nudge moderators
- Analyze audience demographics and engagement metrics to optimize experience
Automation empowers more engaging meetings by eliminating the complexity barriers of massive video events.
Comparing Leading Solutions
Google Meet leads the video conferencing space along with top competitors like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. While automation delivers value across all platforms, there are some differences:
| Google Meet | Zoom | MS Teams | |
| Ease of Use | ***** | **** | **** |
| Recording Automation | ***** | *** | ** |
| Calendar Integration | ***** | ** | ***** |
| CRM Integration | **** | ***** | ***** |
Google Meet rates very highly for user-friendly experience and deep calendar integration. Zoom offers greatest CRM plugin capabilities while Microsoft Teams also strongly connects calendar and other Office apps.
Determine which platform(s) your organization utilizes and explore automation capabilities within those meeting tools. Multi-platform automation tools can also orchestrate video meetings across different solutions based on workflow needs.
Best Practices for Automated Workflows
To maximize the effectiveness of automated Google Meet solutions, keep these tips in mind:
- Carefully audit team workflows to identity biggest meeting friction points before choosing automation tools
- Start with quick pilot automations in targeted high-impact areas before organization-wide scale
- Monitor initial automation performance to catch errors and incrementally improve
- Analyze tool adoption across user groups and gather feedback to address issues
- Increase integration sophistication gradually as automation expertise grows
- Control access permissions to safeguard sensitive meeting information
Research by McKinsey on optimizing automation transformations emphasizes focusing on user needs first rather than technology capabilities. Resist over-engineering complex excessive solutions when simplicity may serve the team workflow better.
The Future of Automated Meetings
Looking ahead, intelligent automation will increasingly optimize meeting productivity as the technologies continue advancing.
According to research firm Gartner, over 50% of mid-large enterprises will leverage intelligent automation around meeting workflows by 2025. Enhanced speech recognition, machine learning analytics, and natural language processing allow automation solutions to keep getting smarter over time.
As video meetings persist as a primary collaboration mechanism across global remote teams, automation can help enterprises reclaim lost productivity by streamlining coordination. The freed up resources can focus on driving meaningful organizational results through connection.
Conclusion
Meetings keep organizations aligned, but unnecessary complexity and administrivia create friction. Intelligent automation delivers immense value by eliminating the scheduling hassles, integrating disjointed systems, facilitating engagement for large events, and reducing other manually intensive meeting burdens.
The top virtual conferencing platforms all benefit from proper application of automation techniques. Google Meet provides a particularly well-rounded, user-friendly foundation. As with any organizational technology transformation, focus first on aligning automation capabilities to actual team workflow needs, starting small and iterating based on user feedback.
In the future automation promises even smarter meeting coordination. But in the present, already available solutions can save teams countless hours compared to manual meeting management. Automate the busywork so participants can better focus on having the meaningful discussions that move initiatives forward. More meetings contribute to enterprise success when powered by automation.
