As the workplace becomes more advanced, companies are embracing virtual team meetings. Virtual meetings offer several benefits for workers. They include increased flexibility, face-to-face time with other offices, and less of a siloed effect by encouraging interaction across departments.

Organizations rely more frequently on freelance, contract, and remote work to accomplish their goals. Which, necessitates the need for virtual meetings. Flexible schedules can also result in people needing to attend a meeting virtually instead of in person.

While virtual team meetings are fruitful, it’s good to have tips for conference attendees, too. You can run into technical issues or find people aren’t fully present in a virtual meeting. Running an efficient virtual team meeting really comes down to planning and preparing. Yes, you’ll want to create an agenda and make sure the right team members are invited. But, you should go the extra mile by audio recording meetings. You’ll see the benefits of doing so almost immediately.

How Audio Recording Virtual Meetings Helps

Audio recording meetings won’t prevent all of the roadblocks of virtual team meetings. However, they offer a solution that is beneficial for everyone involved. Here are five reasons why audio recording should be a standard practice in your company. Whether it’s a virtual meeting or fully in-person.

Efficient Note Taking

Note-taking is different than transcribing a meeting. Notes should be short thoughts or reminders, not a word-for-word rundown of what’s going on. However, it’s very easy to get caught up in trying to write everything down. After all, if someone is talking for a while or not being succinct with their point, it’s in our nature to try and capture all of their thoughts so we don’t miss something important. But that’s not helping you focus and be in the moment.

With an audio recording of the meeting, paired with a follow-up transcription, none of the meeting’s participants have to take rigorous notes. You can just jot down the high-level stuff. That way, you’re keeping your mind and attention present, which is beneficial for everyone involved.

Better Brainstorming

Attendees of virtual team meetings will experience some kind of attention lapse. A remote worker may get distracted by their dog, someone in the room will be clicking to another website or messenger, or an employee may be furiously scribbling notes. There are any number of reasons why you might see a lapse in attention.

However, the people who are most present during meetings will offer better insight, especially if the meeting is interactive. That’s because they’re paying attention and are able to chime into the conversation at the right moments. By listening and adapting to what’s in the room, you’re not only contributing to the meeting, but you’re also building a stronger connection with your teammates. Even better, you’ll come up with strong ideas after the meeting because you’ll have a record of what was said.

Ease of Sharing

Despite our best efforts to attend every meeting we’re invited to, sometimes life gets in the way. Anyone in your organization could be working on an urgent project or have a meeting run long, or they may have a doctor’s appointment at the time of the meeting. Just because someone is unable to attend, they shouldn’t miss out on information because of those other obligations. Their input and expertise is still valuable, and they can contribute after the fact. 

When you’re including these people in your post-meeting follow-up steps, keep in mind that an audio recording can be shared more easily than memos. A recording includes all of the details of the meeting, including tone of voice or any final “water cooler” thoughts, and can be delivered immediately. With a memo, you’ll have to wait for someone to get around to typing notes, which can take hours or even days. If you missed a meeting and couldn’t get started on a project until you received the meeting notes, it’s so much more convenient to get an audio recording meeting to get up to speed than to rely on a colleague to get their notes over to you.

Solves for Technological Difficulties

Much like virtual team meetings routinely feature employee lapses in attention, you’ll also encounter plenty of technical difficulties. You may have a shaky internet connection, have trouble hearing everyone, or use software that quits unexpectedly in the middle of a presentation. When the host has an audio recording of the meeting, those issues disappear. Rather than worrying about people missing out due to technical difficulties, you can breathe easy knowing that everyone will have the full context of the meeting.

Clear Follow Up Plan

Audio recordings can also be used to create follow-up tasks and ensure everyone is aligned on the next steps. With so many moving parts in a virtual team meeting, it can be difficult to know who owns which project and what ideas everyone will move forward with. Especially with brainstorming sessions, a virtual meeting attendee can get more lost than…well, the people from the show Lost.

While that person could try to explore new ideas using the thoughts cobbled together for a meeting, it would be so much easier to just listen to an audio recording. Imagine – all the information from the past half hour or hour (or even longer) condensed into a single file that can be shared instantly. And if you attended the meeting in person, you can feel good knowing that you helped other colleagues out by sharing the audio recording, allowing them to get rolling on their work.

Try Audio Recording Your Next Virtual Team Meetings

Now that you know some of the benefits of audio recording, it’s time to take the next step and learn more about them and how they help make teams more efficient. You’ve got lots of different options for sharing those recordings, too. You can share the raw audio file, use it as a complement to meeting notes, or go a step further and take advantage of transcription services. 

Think about it: between work and meetings, you’re incredibly busy in your career. Why not take some of that time back by getting your audio recording transcribed quickly and easily. You can use the extra time and energy to focus on your next big project – and with a transcription of the meeting handy, you’ll be primed for success.