As shelter-in-place moves into the 3rd month for many workers across the globe, the early results from this giant work-from-home experiment suggest that employee behavior has shifted in a variety of ways to accommodate this new work/life dynamic. In general, 71% of remote employees acknowledge that they are working more hours than ever before, and for the most part they are achieving new levels of productivity. That said, employee burnout is a very real risk confronting the remote workforce and organizations will want to start to implement best-practices for mitigating this pressure.
Meetings are one of the productivity levers that organizations are using to keep their employees connected during these challenging times. That said, there are reports highlighting that the percentage of internal meetings has skyrocketed during this period. Therefore, we observe a natural tension between workers wanting to stay in synch, yet feeling overwhelmed by the requirement to do so, and thereby creating frustration with the meeting culture that has evolved as the pandemic has progressed. At BlueJeans, we feel there is a better way to manage a stuffed meeting calendar…just say no…use BlueJeans Smart Meetings.
Smart Meetings enables remote workers to reclaim their calendar by ensuring that all meeting highlights and actions will be catalogued and cascaded automatically—regardless if every meeting participant attends the meeting or not. The intent is to eliminate Meeting FOMO—anxiety felt by not attending a meeting for fear that you will miss relevant information—by empowering a core set of meeting stakeholders with a more intelligent approach for notetaking and note-sharing.
We have started rolling out Smart Meetings to every BlueJeans customer and will have enabled all customers by Friday, May 8th with the ability to tag meeting highlights, assign actions, and watch quick-hit meeting summaries. Joint BlueJeans and Slack customers will be able to take advantage of our new Smart Meetings integration that automatically populates meeting summary information directly into a dedicated Slack channel. Additionally, our transcription add-on is now generally available and ready to be implemented to add additional meeting context to highlights and meeting summaries.
The natural language processing capability we have developed for meeting transcription also gives us the toolkit to now offer automatic closed captioning for customers with accessibility needs. In addition to closed captioning, BlueJeans offers keyboard accessibility, screen reader compatibility, and high-contrast options to ensure that everyone has the ability to connect using BlueJeans.
Ultimately, we recognize that remote workers across the globe are doing their best to meet the challenges of balancing their work and personal lives. We hope that by enabling all customers with Smart Meetings, we can help to ease the burden and introduce a new and compelling feature set that frees up calendar time, while creating efficiencies for distributing knowledge across the workforce.
Please visit our support page for more information on how to use Smart Meetings.