One major friction point in organizations is how to update people who missed meetings. Now that BlueJeans is Integrated with Workplace by Facebook, keeping people informed is as easy as broadcasting your BlueJeans meetings directly into Workplace.
People miss meetings for all kinds of reasons and a considerable amount of time is taken to update people on what they missed. Yes, you can take very good notes and email those out, but who reads those notes? Moreover, who takes notes well enough and with enough detail that context and nuance is captured properly?
Answer: No one.
Even if the notes were taken perfectly, anyone who has played that game in which "one person whispers to the ear of the next person through a line of people until the last player announces the message to the entire group" knows that the message gets dramatically changed as to be incomparable to the original.
To keep people updated, you can schedule a follow up meeting or go by someone's desk and give them the run down. Who has time for that?
You can record a meeting in a virtual meeting tool and send out the recording. But who remembers to record the meeting? Who, then, wants to convert the recording, upload it, send it out, and make sure everyone has access to it? Even if you can or want to do all of that, the recording file might be too big to attach to an email or people have to log in or fill out a form on the virtual meeting product website to view the recording.
See what I mean?
Friction.
All (most) of this friction goes away with the new BlueJeans integration with Workplace. Now, you can host a meeting on BlueJeans and stream it live to a specific group in Workplace. Members of that group can watch the meeting live, even though they were not involved in the meeting. People who should have been in the meeting, but missed it, can watch the recording because it is automatically saved to the Workplace group.
Automatically.
And there is no limit to the number of videos or the size of the video files.
What happened when we started broadcasting our meetings?
We just started doing this. In fact, On Monday, May 15, 2017, our sales, marketing, and product teams held a meeting to set follow-up actions following a major conference we sponsored the week before. Since not everyone could attend, and since we just got access to the BlueJeans / Workplace integration, we decided to broadcast the meeting in the conference meeting group.
Look, magic did not happen. We didn't all of a sudden have epiphanies that changed the way we work and doubled our sales over night. But, this did cause people to question whether they should do the same. In fact, some of our managers were so excited to see this that they decided to start using BlueJeans to run their weekly manager meetings. Our weekly manager meetings are attended by people from four global offices in the United States, Malaysia, Australia, Chile. These are distributed leaders who work asynchronously. And the best way to keep everyone informed is to broadcast and automatically store the recording of all these meetings in our Workplace manager group.
It beats rotating who takes notes for the meeting.
Why would you want to do this?
I know that some of you might be thinking of all the reasons why you would not want to do this. But instead of dwelling on the negative, let's talk about reasons why you would do this.
If you believe in transparency.....
According to an article in the Journal of Accountancy, transparency includes making "documents that are open to the public easy to access." In other words, transparency does not mean making everything available. It means taking what you want to be made available and make it easy to access.
So, if anything in your corporate culture, values, or mission statement uses the word transparency, you should actually be transparent, which means making it easy for people to access the information that you say you want them to access. What could make it easier than simply broadcasting meetings on Workplace and sharing those recordings with the appropriate people in those groups.
Keep people informed
We could all learn a big lesson from the WD-40 Company and their Maniac Pledge:
I am responsible for taking action, asking questions, getting answers, and making decisions. I won’t wait for someone to tell me. If I need to know, I’m responsible for asking. I have no right to be offended that I didn’t “get this sooner.” If I’m doing something others should know about, I’m responsible for telling them.
Instead of running meetings and then doing some work to inform people what was discussed, you can just broadcast (and save) meetings in appropriate Workplace Groups and encourage people to watch the video if they want to stay informed. Make it easier for people to take responsibility for staying informed.
Ask for input/ideas...fast
In the process of broadcasting meetings from BlueJeans to Workplace Groups, there is a built in conversational element using the comments in Workplace. Backchannel discussions can occur during meetings and long after the meetings are over during which people can ask questions, provide input, and share ideas. Imagine if you are asked in a meeting for some numbers beyond what you prepared. In the moment, you could mention someone on your team (who is not in the meeting) and ask them to provide the information in the comments. When they do, everyone can see it and talk about it. Forget about following up after the meeting. These things can happen in near-real time in BlueJeans and Workplace.
Keep an archive
Since there are no limits in Workplace on how many videos or how large the video files are, you can record all of your meetings in Workplace and keep them there for as long as you want. That way, anyone can view recordings of meeting anytime.
Integration in Beta
If you are a BlueJeans and a Workplace customer, you should request access with BlueJeans and give it a try. If you are not a customer of BlueJeans or Workplace, this might be one more reason why you should consider using both products.
Learn more about Workplace
If you want to learn more about how the BlueJeans and Workplace integration work or you otherwise want to learn more about what is possible in Workplace, join one of our live, virtual sessions called Workplace: Start Here. In these one hour session, you will learn how to use Workplace to get more done, and you can ask any questions you want.
These live sessions normally cost $100 per person. But since you read this blog post, you can use the the coupon code, SERVICEROCKETBLOG, to join the session for free. That's free learning.
