Meeting management made easy: A practical example from a Management Office

Organising meetings is time-consuming and often stressful. Anyone who has been entrusted with this task knows this: for executive assistants, personal assistants, or corporate secretaries, providing administrative support for meetings is an important part of their daily work.

This is also the case for Nadine Kalt, Management Office employee at Raiffeisenbank Wasserschloss. She is convinced that every company benefits in the short- and long-term from the right framework for meeting management.

The Raiffeisenbanks have taken this exact strategic step. Thanks to the introduction of Sherpany's meeting management software, Nadine Kalt feels as though she is optimally supported today. "I used to spend much more time on meetings than I do today. I save up to four hours of work per meeting," she says. Let's find out how these gains were achieved.

Preventing chaos

"Close to chaos" - that's how Nadine Kalt describes the meeting organisation before they implemented Sherpany. In the absence of a holistic meeting management tool, the management team used more than four different software to organise their meetings - email, collaboration solutions, document management systems, and more. This meant an enormous amount of work for Nadine Kalt and also for the meeting participants.

Historically, she had to request the meeting documents individually from all participants and then forward them by email. In addition to this, she also had to store certain data in a secure document repository for compliance reasons, and kept the agenda in a Microsoft Word document. "This approach to meeting management was not efficient. And keeping track of it was a huge challenge," Kalt says.

The lack of standardisation meant each person had to find their own system in order to prepare and retrieve meeting documents efficiently. Time and again, this caused confusion: documents were saved incorrectly, were not up to date, or were overlooked by certain participants in their full email inboxes. Unnecessary discussions then wasted valuable meeting time.

A daily help

The process cost Nadine Kalt "a lot of time and nerves." However, since she began using Sherpany in November 2020, many things have changed for the better. The Management Office employee explains:

"Today, the entire meeting process - from the agenda to the documents to the minutes - runs through Sherpany alone. I use the software every day. It makes my life much easier as I have a complete overview at all times and don't have to constantly click through various tools. In addition, all documents for audits are stored in one, central location."

Having all the information at your fingertips significantly increases efficiency, according to Kalt. When searching for documents from past meetings, she "no longer has to click through five folders" but uses Sherpany's global search function.

From A to Z

But what does organising a meeting look like for the management office employee?

• The process starts with the agenda: Since the agenda items are often repeated, Nadine Kalt clones the previous meeting with one click and makes the necessary adjustments. She requests the related documents from the responsible persons directly in Sherpany.
• Once the agenda is set, she shares a draft with the meeting chair. As soon as the agenda is approved, Nadine Kalt publishes the meeting for all participants and informs them directly via Sherpany that everything is ready.
• After that, participants prepare individually. "People are excited every time I introduce them to the Sherpany annotations feature," Kalt says. With this, each person can work on documents individually and prepare themselves optimally. Participants then also begin to exchange ideas via the comment function - sometimes even before the meeting, as Kalt explains.
• Taking minutes, which used to be very time-consuming, has also been greatly simplified, partly due to the change in internal processes. With Sherpany, the agenda serves as a minutes template and all important information about the meeting is pre-filled. Any corrections and approvals that are required also run in Sherpany (in some cases directly during the meeting).
• In addition, the function for circular resolutions saves Nadine Kalt a lot of work: Resolutions that do not require discussion can thus be easily voted on digitally with the options "Yes," "No," and "Abstain".

Greater efficiency in meetings

Sherpany has not only added a lot of value to the management office staff, but to the entire management team, as meetings have become much more efficient: "Since all information is now quickly and easily available in Sherpany, it is natural that all participants have seen all the information and have adequately prepared themselves. This eliminates unnecessary discussions and makes exchanges more focused," Kalt explains. 

In addition, she says, Sherpany's user interface is very modern and people learn to use it in a very short time. Furthermore, she quickly receives support from Sherpany's customer support when she needs it.

Nadine Kalt is glad that she has Sherpany's meeting management software to support her. With Sherpany, she has been able to fundamentally optimise her meeting management and therefore the success of her meetings. The four hours she saves per meeting thanks to Sherpany, and better processes, round things off nicely. "I can highly recommend Sherpany," Kalt sums up.

Are you also ready to take your meeting management to the next level?