Being a consultant comes with about 23 hours’ worth of time per week dedicated to meetings, which on an average translates to over 4.5 hours of meetings per day. A normal schedule in the life of a consultant consists of a loop in terms of managing clients. They have to consistently grow the number of prospects while giving time and processes to the existing ones.
Increase In Meetings Since COVID-19
While the dynamic restructuring in the ways we function is occurring, it is vital to stick to the path of accomplishing goals which means that we need additional support for the ‘work from home’ option. Since the pandemic, there is a 10% increase in short meetings that usually take 30 minutes, which means that people need to connect more often over audio/ video calls to get updates, set the right expectations and execute the deals.
Manual Meeting Notes Waste Time And Money
On an average an associate consultant’s salary ranges between $70,000 to $150,000. The associate consultants’ primary job is to spend time on:
- Planning new products / services to offer to clients
- Data analysis
- Market research & competitor analysis
- Strategic recommendations
What does this information mean for the consulting firms? Consultants are expensive and their time should be spent on primary tasks.
An average consultant spends only 9% of their time on planning, 22% on marketing, 26% on service & 21% time on administrative tasks in a week. The administrative tasks comprise of taking meeting notes and preparing meeting memos to report updates to seniors. All of this time could be saved if consultants had proper tech support to do their real job as well as give the firms the worth of their money that is spent on employee salaries.
Employee Demand On Tech Support
Another major aspect in the life of consultants is traveling for work. In the normal days, people would travel to cities and plan on lunch/ dinner meetings with clients to bond and discuss goals. A study says, 37% employees are asking for travel cuts and demanding for ‘high tech support platforms’ to enable efficient work from home. Just giving them online conference software isn’t enough. Companies need to think about all the work they need to do and provide feasible tech support to make them get work done more efficiently with high-quality.
Types Of Meetings & Importance Of Meeting Notes
A primary research to get more information revealed that consultants usually begin and end their days with meetings, mostly internal. The first call of the day is to team members to set the agenda of the day while the end of the day call usually acts like an update call from the day’s work which is elaborated in weekly calls. This schedule means that, especially managers not only have to store information on their own clients, but also from the clients of their team members.
On top of this, consultants also have to spend time interviewing industry experts to get relevant information while also conducting meetings with executives & the leadership teams to reflect on their understanding and expectations.
Whether it is an internal meeting or an external meeting, it is crucial to keep all information and data in place. Every client calls for consultants, depending on the type of consultancy, comes with an expectation of work progress and feedback after every stage. Considering a handful of clients with a consultant, it is very important, especially now that there is a 10% increase in meetings since COVID, that employees get the support that they seek as mentioned earlier. Taking notes is usually not considered courteous on video calls and keeping up with the pace during audio calls is not an easy task either. Consultants attend 56% of client meetings while 73% calls are internal that consist of updates, sharing minutes of the meeting and planning the call to action.
All of this combined is A LOT of information to deal with and here is when effective meeting notes come into play!
To summarize, meeting notes is not only vital to the consultants but also valuable to the firm’s progress. However, it is important to focus on:
- Importance of investing in tech to support the increase in meetings and also to keep the employees motivated
- Save time for the consultants to do their real job, i.e., data analysis, market research, etc
- Worth for the spend on employees by enabling then with required tools
Let’s take a pause here & meet Jack. Welcome Jack who is an anonymous consultant who would like to share his story with you, our wonderful readers to share his take on how remote working has changed the way he has been managing his meetings.
So tell us Jack, how do you manage your meetings while working remotely these days?
Hello wonderful readers! I would start with saying that the work has definitely increased since the onset of COVID which means that most of our reporting, client meetings, follow- ups have started happening over video chats. Another change in the system of work is that our point of contact with each client has increased. As we all understand, in such scenario’s communication is the key but so is taking notes.
It is tedious to first of all take notes in audio calls hence I have shifted more to video calls. I do take notes, but I also have started recording my conversations on my phone which I have to listen to at the end of my tiring days to recall everything from the meeting and report to my seniors. Furthermore, as a consultant I have a lot of data analytics to put my attention and time to, but the tedious process of taking notes & making memos absorbs a huge chunk of my time.
This has led to a lot of imbalance in my different works of life. Continuously taking meeting notes from several meetings in a day takes away a lot of time from my personal space, hence the increase in work!
The rest of my conversation with Jack is history, but what did we take- away from that conversation?
We need tech support:
- To aid in recordings
- Generate real-time transcripts for minutes of the meetings
- Help in making personalized memos for reporting and accounting
You are at the right place my friends. Click here to know how Laxis can help you with its world class AI solutions focused at serving its customers as a personal assistant. Here’s a short video to introduce you to our solutions.
With Laxis’s AI-powered meeting notes service, consultants can get away from tedious work and focus on doing the most important work to create value to clients, consumers and companies.
- Laxis captures every conversation for you wherever it happens and generates real-time meeting transcriptions
- Laxis saves meeting notes in one place for you and they are searchable and editable
- Laxis highlights meeting points, analyzes patterns and uncovers insights ready for your use
Check out Laxis, do smart work! Sign up for beta use at our home page. See you there!
.svg)
