Remote Status Meetings in Confluence
TL;DR — HuddleBot, the automatic check-ins app for Confluence levels up remote meetings.
As businesses have transitioned to more work done remotely, daily routines have had to shift. Status meetings are a common and important touch point for teams. It’s a time that everyone can sync up and even socialize a bit.
There are some holes in this system. When the person next to you is speaking…who was listening? Not me, I was thinking about what I was going to say next. Not only that but don’t ask me what you said last week…or what I said for that matter. There’s no paper trail for status meetings and that makes it hard to keep track of progress or anything really.
In the new world of remote work all the time, it’s still mostly the same. Now it’s just a little more awkward and less social over phone or video. The problems are still here if not heightened.
Confluence, the collaborative workspace tool from Atlassian, the makers of Trello, is a great place to store meeting notes. If you’re already using Confluence as your document repository, it makes sense to use it to keep track of meetings as well. You can create a new meeting notes page for every meeting you have and have one person take notes.
This method is a little stale and still requires everyone to be available at the same time of day. It also doesn’t improve the overall meeting experience.
Let’s take this to the next level.
Level Up…level up…level up
Let’s design a better system. These are the core tenets that the new system should have.
- Respond on your own time.
- All reports are written.
- Open and transparent.
- Organized. View current and past meetings.
This is where HuddleBot comes in. HuddleBot creates a system that meets all of these requirements. HuddleBot lets you create automatic check-ins to send to your team on a regular basis.
You create a “huddle” with a question or prompt and schedule how often you want it to send out. When the time comes, it will be sent out to your team and everyone can respond on their own time. Everyone’s responses are visible and you can comment on each other’s responses. You can view past responses easily too.
What’s more is that huddles don’t have to be all business. You can create some fun ones that don’t send as often. What books have you read recently? What’s a vacation you’re dreaming of? These help foster some of the social aspects that you might have lost by being remote. They also let you get to know each other a little better virtually.
HuddleBot for Confluence is available on the Atlassian Marketplace.
