TURN YOUR MEETING ON ITS HEAD

www.panopto.com855.PANOPTO

Your guide to doing more—in less time—by flipping your meetings

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The way we do meetings today is broken. Meetings at most organizations are PowerPoint-driven lectures, structured to offer little opportunity to get real work done and real decisions made.

But there is an alternative. The flipped meeting—pioneered by innovative companies like Amazon and LinkedIn and built on the model of the flipped classroom that has been rolled out in universities across the country and around the world.

The flipped meeting approach is revolutionary in its simplicity:• Share the informational presentation before the meeting so participants

are fully informed up front• Focus the meeting on making decisions, opening discussion, and getting

work done in the meeting, not afterwards

This handbook includes a guide to developing a flipped meeting culture in your organization, including:

• Pre-meeting communication and information sharing needs• In-meeting group management best practices• Ideas for using video to make flipped meetings even more efficient

Flipping your meetings can help you win back time wasted in meetings, ensure that every meeting you attend is productive, and empower your teams to collaboratively make smarter, timelier decisions.

BRINGING EVERYTHING INTO VIEW

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Panopto creates software that enables businesses and academic institutions to record and view searchable video presentations in minutes from any device. Businesses can use Panopto to record and live stream:

• Review, recap, and summary communications• All-hands meetings• Executive communications• Events for customers, press, and investors• Product demonstrations • Sales and marketing presentations• Employee training and onboarding videos• Web conferences

Panopto also enables individual employees to record and share videos in a secure, centralized video library. This facilitates:

• Social and informal learning• Capturing the knowledge of retiring employees• Sharing knowledge across a global workforce

Panopto’s video library includes unique search functionality that enables employees to search inside videos for any word mentioned or shown onscreen during a video.

Panopto is currently in use at Fortune 500 companies around the world and is the fastest-growing lecture capture solution at leading universities. Privately-held, Panopto was founded in 2007 by technology entrepreneurs and software design veterans at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science.

The company was recently recognized by Gartner as the only “Visionary” in its 2013 Enterprise Video Content Management Magic Quadrant. Learn more at http://panop.to/gartner-visionary.

Want to try Panopto for yourself? Visit www.panopto.com today for a free 30-day trial or to schedule a demonstration of our software.

PANOPTO ON A PAGE

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The Way We Do Meetings Is Broken ........................................................................ 5

Pioneering A New Kind Of Meeting ........................................................................ 6

Can A Better Classroom Inspire A Better Meeting? ............................................... 7

The Basic Flipped Meeting ..................................................................................... 8

The Six-Part Flipped Meeting Framework ............................................................... 9

Making Flipped Meetings Easy—With Video ........................................................ 10

Pre-Meeting Summary Video ............................................................................ 11

Post-Meeting Summary & Action Items ............................................................ 11

Record R.O.L.E Meetings ................................................................................... 12

In 100 Words: Why Panopto Is An Essential Part Of Your Flipped Meeting ........... 13

Key Takeaways ........................................................................................................ 13

OVERVIEW

TURN YOUR MEETING ON ITS HEAD

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~31~Hours each month1 that you, your colleagues, your team, and everyone else you know will spend in unproductive meetings. That’s 50% of the total time you’ll spend in meetings each month. And almost a full week’s worth of time you could have otherwise used to actually get something done.

~91~Percent of those among us willing to admit to having daydreamed through unproductive meetings.2 Or if you aren’t prone to zoning out, you may still count yourself among the 73% who bring other work to their meetings, or the 96% who’ve just skipped a less-than-useful meeting outright.

~37~One estimate of the annual US salary cost alone3 for all the pointless meetings we attend—$37 BILLION down the drain annually. It’s a figure that accelerates as we schedule more and more meetings, with more and more attendees, every single year.

THE WAY WE DO MEETINGS TODAY IS BROKENToo many organizations—large and small—are addicted to bad meetings.

Too many of our meetings start with little more than a quick agenda and a whole lot of wishful thinking. We hope the right people will attend, that they’ll know offhand whatever information we may need, and that we can talk ourselves into a workable consensus. What we often get are partly-attended sessions with partly-informed participants, often only able to accept or reject the meeting scheduler’s ideas rather than come up with intelligent thoughts as a group.

We meet to “talk over”, to “get alignment”, to “give status”, to “report back”. Important communications no doubt, but all things that could be accomplished with an email or a casual conversation. When these objectives become formal meetings, they invariably transform into 60 minutes of a single person droning on over PowerPoint, with 10 or so other people politely sitting idle while their inboxes fill up.

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For all our addiction to meetings, we almost never meet to actually get work done. Instead, we use our meetings to create lists of things to do once we’re no longer wrapped up in meetings. Next steps, decisions needed, approvals sought—all the essentials of our projects that need our team’s attention, meekly outlined for later when we could have just worked on it while we were all together in the first place.

IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAYInnovative companies like Amazon4 and LinkedIn5 are pioneering a new way. Theirs is a new style of meeting that prizes action over presentation. Engagement over attendance. And actual information over pretty PowerPoint slides.

Best of all, it’s a new format that any organization can adopt overnight—all it requires is a simple, fundamental change in two of the expectations we have for our meetings.

First: this new style mandates that the presenter share their presentation before the meeting begins, and that the audience likewise review it ahead of time.

At LinkedIn, this simply means decks are shared 24 hours in advance. Amazon goes a step further, dedicating 5-15 minutes at the start of each meeting as “quiet reading time” so participants can read the materials.

Second: this new style insists that rather than creating lists of things to do later, everyone attending the meeting must use that time to execute on the objective of the meeting.

Whether the goal is to make a decision, outline a plan, revise a workflow or anything else, the team must use the scheduled meeting time to actually achieve those goals—then and there.

What’s the value? In a word, action.

Reviewing presentation materials in advance ensures attendees will have time to earnestly consider the subject. Assumptions can be double checked. Subject matter experts can be brought to comment. Alternatives can be imagined. Healthy debate can ensue. And presenters can’t blindside anyone in making their case.

Traditional meetings are structured to minimize disagreement and debate with the presenter doing most of the talking. But real progress can only be made if you structure meetings in a way that brings up points of disagreement as early in the meeting as possible—minimizing time to disagreement and maximizing time available for the collective to come to consensus. And that’s the promise of the flipped meeting.

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Expecting decisions to be made during the meeting—and dedicating the meeting time to discussion rather than presentation—encourages all attendees to stay engaged, adopt positions, make informed decisions, and keep projects moving. And when they walk out the door to understand the big picture of why they took action.

CAN A BETTER CLASSROOM INSPIRE A BETTER MEETING?While Amazon and LinkedIn are at the bleeding edge from a corporate perspective when it comes to flipping the format of their meetings, they are laggards in the big picture. Academia has been leading the way with flipped classrooms for the better part of a decade.

The flipped classroom concept came about to solve a problem as old as education itself—how to effectively teach an entire group when individuals learn at different speeds. After centuries of the classic “lecture & homework” system forcing fast and slow learners alike to adapt to the pace of the teacher, a new model has emerged.

In a flipped classroom, students are expected to review each day’s lesson before class. Teachers assign reading selections, and often couple them with short lecture presentations (often called “microlectures”) recorded ahead of time with software like Panopto. This enables students to take as much time as they require to learn each subject, rereading materials and rewinding the video whenever they may need.

In the classroom, the teacher acts as guide for the now-prepared class to engage in discussion and work on their daily assignment (which would have been homework in the old model). Because they’ve had time to prepare, students are often better able to work through the activity—and always have their classmates as well as their teacher nearby should a question arise (rather than guessing later on at home).

The flipped classroom gives students the flexibility they need to take in a lesson, then makes the best use of class time to ensure students can think through their work, check with peers, and discuss ideas with their professor.

Best of all, flipped classrooms actually work—study after study reports that reviewing materials beforehand and turning a lecture into an interactive working session yields statistically significant improvements in engagement, test scores, and long-term learning.6

Amazon, LinkedIn, and hundreds of other intelligent organizations around the world are putting the flipped concept to work for their meetings—isn’t it time your company did too?

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THE BASIC FLIPPED MEETINGOnce you’ve gotten the all parties at the table, your basic flipped meeting is easy. There’s just one catch: once you’re all at the table, you’ve already missed the opportunity to flip.

Flipping a meeting requires the meeting organizer to plan—and communicate—ahead of time. Whether your next flipped meeting succeeds or fails almost always depends on the work done before anyone even opens the conference room door.

To ensure the success of your flipped meeting, there are three essential elements you’ll need to prepare and share ahead of time:

YOUR GOAL(S) FOR THE MEETINGYou can’t flip a meeting if you don’t have anything for the assembled group to achieve. What work do you want to get done? What decisions do you want made? Be specific.

YOUR DRIVER(S) FOR THE MEETINGThe meeting driver should have the authority to ensure the meeting produces results, and to act on those results. Most of the time that will be you, but you may need to prep your boss (or another member of the team) to lead in some cases.

YOUR MATERIALS FOR THE MEETING The whole point of meeting as a group is to discuss, so you’ll want a discussion guide prepared in advance. Give people the information they need in order to participate in an informed way, with enough time to reasonably review it all.

In terms of lead time, 24 hours is the gold standard. If you’re just testing out the flipped meeting format, start there and see how people react. You may find 48 or 72 hours is more suitable for your team, or instead that just a few hours’ notice for meetings scheduled later in the day works perfectly.

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In terms of sharing information, this too will be something to test and optimize with your team. You may find the same PowerPoint deck you already create works perfectly, or that a brief bullet point outline via email suffices. Or, you may find that adopting a new model improves the outcome—Amazon now famously organizes meetings around 6-page Word documents7.

Whatever your format, the crucial part of information sharing is actually sharing enough information for attendees to make informed decisions. Early on it may be helpful to use a documented framework to ensure the right information is shared as you work out what’s right for your organization.

THE SIX-PART INFORMATION SHARING FLIPPED MEETING FRAMEWORK: Context or Question: In 1-2 sentences, what is the issue that must be resolved or action that must be taken?

Larger Vision: What are the overall objectives that describe at a high level what success looks like?

Our Tenets: What are the enduring, guiding principles for our organization we will use to evaluate this decision or work?

Assumptions: What are the fundamental assumptions made in formulating options? What are the key facts relevant to the decision or work at hand?

Options: What are the alternative options available? What are the pros and cons of each?

Recommendation: Which option do you recommend for the audience? Why? What are the next steps?

WHEN THE MEETING BEGINSWhile a flipped meeting requires a little more work up front, you’ll reap the rewards during the session. The key is that your role now is not to lecture, but to guide the discussion and work.

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A few tips to keep your flipped meeting running efficiently:

Start with a short amount of time for independent review of the meeting materials so you’ll know everyone has read them. Try 5 minutes for a 30 minute meeting, 10 minutes for an hour.

Assign someone to take notes. A full transcript isn’t necessary, but good high-level summary of positions taken and decisions made will be useful.

Define the objective of the meeting you’re holding and repeat the goal(s). Do this at the outset to make sure everyone’s on the same page.

Open the floor to discussion/work. That’s it! Start working toward your goal.

Close discussion when the decision is made, work complete, or further progress is impossible. Don’t meet for a second longer than you need to.

Summarize key outcomes & decisions. A brief email summary and reminder of next steps will help keep the work moving. Try to have one ready for the group before the end of the day.

As with any new process, it may take time for your organization to adjust to this new way of doing business. Look for opportunities to optimize the way your team flips its meetings—to save even more time, get even more done, and make even more happen.

MAKE FLIPPED MEETINGS EASY—WITH VIDEOThe basics of a flipped meeting are simple - share information ahead of time, focus on making decisions in-meeting, and follow up with a summary to keep your team up to date and moving forward. Success requires just a little planning and a commitment to getting the documentation right.

Want to make flipping your meetings even easier? The tool is literally right in front of you—in the form of the webcam in your laptop or smartphone.

Video can be used to support and simplify almost every aspect of a flipped meeting. There are three tasks in particular where video will make your life much easier.

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#1: PRE-MEETING SUMMARY VIDEOSharing your meeting materials ahead of time for your team to review is essential to successfully flipping your meeting. But most of us still want that opportunity to present the most essential points.

Here’s where we can go above and beyond with a best practice from the flipped classroom concept. Recording a quick video summary of your presentation materials - just as a screen capture, or with Panopto to capture your PowerPoint slides and record your presentation—gives you the opportunity to provide a quick executive summary to pair with your materials.

You’ll want to keep your pre-meeting summary video short—aim for 3-5 minutes when preparing a 30 minute meeting, and 5-7 minutes when preparing for an hour or more. As a rule viewers get distracted or click away after only a few minutes, so you’ll need to put your most important information right up front and make your point quickly.

For your audience, a brief video overview can help familiarize them with your topic, provide a strong point of reference as to the goals of the meeting, and establish you as the driver to keep the meeting moving as it should.

#2: POST-MEETING SUMMARY & ACTION ITEMSThe post-meeting email wrap up identifying new or remaining action items, deliverables, and points of accountability is essential to keeping the work moving. But getting all that from your notes into email takes time.

A better option? A video recap! When your meeting wraps, take just 5 minutes with your laptop or smartphone webcam and record yourself summarizing your discussion and detailing decisions and next steps. And if you’ve used a whiteboard to take notes, you can even capture the details recorded there too.

Once you’ve finished, just upload the video to your company’s video content management system (VCMS, or “corporate YouTube”), share the link with your team, and get back to work. You’ll be surprised just how much time a 5 minute video will save you in place of the standard email write up.

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#3: Record ROLE (Reference, Onboarding, Learning and Education) MeetingsWhen your meetings feature thoughtful discussions and real decisions, more often than not they’ll be invaluable additions to your education and onboarding video libraries. Likewise, over time recording your flipped meetings will build a powerful reference library of past solutions, proposed options, and more ideas you can use in the future to inform and enhance your organization’s next proposals.

Your flipped meeting is valuable to you because it helps you get decisions made and actions taken. But don’t forget the big picture! A record of your meeting may be an invaluable asset to a new team member getting up to speed, or another team’s project manager searching out past solutions that may help their situation.

Recording your meetings and making them available on your company’s corporate YouTube is a great way to share ideas, embrace transparency, and help new and existing members of your team understand where the company is headed and why.

Your VCMS can even help extend the life of your videos, by making them—and all their valuable content—easier to find. Whereas video stored on local networks is often quickly forgotten about and generally inaccessible by other teams, a VCMS can centralize your video so more people can find what they need.

Panopto takes inside video search to a whole new level. Along with indexing basic information like title and description, Panopto goes further, indexing transcriptions, notes, and even the text in your presentation slides—and makes it all searchable. Panopto does all this for every video in your library, so your employees can find exactly what they need, every time—even if they don’t know exactly what they are looking for.

Modern VCMS solutions like Panopto make storing, sharing, and searching video across your organization a breeze, allowing you to improve your organization’s big picture insights just in the name of getting stuff done.

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IN 100 WORDS: WHY PANOPTO IS AN ESSENTIAL PART OF YOUR FLIPPED MEETINGIntegrating video into your flipped meetings helps improve your advance communications, preserves a record of your meeting, and radically simplifies your follow-up summary. And because video is more powerful than text alone, even a simple video can help make your proposal shine.

Too often though, organizations make video too complicated to use. That’s where Panopto comes in.

Panopto makes everyday video easy for any company. Record with just one click from any video camera. Save automatically—and securely—to the cloud. And search across your entire video library with our revolutionary inside video search capability.

Find out more at www.panopto.com.

KEY TAKEAWAYSWhy should your company flip for flipped meetings? It’s simple. Flipping your meetings can help you:

• Win back time wasted in meetings• Ensure that every meeting you attend is productive• Empower your teams to collaboratively make smarter, timelier decisions

Flipped meetings enable your projects individually and your organization as a whole to be more successful.

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CITATIONS1. EffectiveMeetings.com. Why Do Meetings Have a Bad Reputation?

http://www.effectivemeetings.com/meetingbasics/meetstate.asp2. EffectiveMeetings.com. How Are Unproductive Meetings Affecting Us?

http://www.effectivemeetings.com/meetingbasics/meetstate.asp3. Atlassian.com. You Waste A Lot Of Time At Work.

https://www.atlassian.com/time-wasting-at-work-infographic4. Charlie Rose. Jeff Bezos Interview, Nov 2012. http://www.charlierose.com/watch/601482455. LinkedIn. “A Simple Rule To Eliminate Useless Meetings” July 2013. http://www.linkedin.com/

today/post/article/20130701022638-22330283-a-simple-rule-to-eliminate-useless-meetings6. Vanderbilt University. Center For Teaching, “Flipping The Classroom”.

http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/teaching-guides/teaching-activities/flipping-the-classroom/7. GigaOm Research. Flipped Meetings: Learning from Amazon’s Meeting Policy, Oct 2013

http://research.gigaom.com/2013/10/flipped-meetings/