Automation Workflows to Get the Most Out of Your Zoom Meetings

Being a fully remote startup from day one, we have experienced the friction involved in getting work done — in the virtual working environment. From interviewing potential employees to team meetings to user interviews, we rely on Zoom for pretty much everything over here at Grain. Calling Zoom part of our workday would be an understatement. And, the situation is probably the same for you and your team as well. 

While we all love Zoom for its reliability, it’s far from meeting our expectations. Information is trapped in hour-long recordings, it’s hard to recall who’s responsible for what (ever heard of Zoom amnesia?), and getting the entire team up to speed is nearly impossible. 

Zoom allows us to connect virtually. But it fails to offer the tools to capture or plan the work done. Leveraging Zapier to connect Grain with your work tools changes the game completely. 

You can turn your meetings into a:

• Feedback session, where you can capture and share customer feedback with product teams via Slack, while you’re still in a meeting, 
• Brainstorming session, where you get your team to pitch ideas and share them as individual highlight clips on a notion doc, 
• Planning session, where you discuss the deliverables and get them automatically imported to your project management tool, etc. 

Sounds interesting? Let’s take a look at the best automation workflows (Zaps) that can help you get the most out of your Zoom meetings. They’re proven to deliver results and save your time by a whopping 90%! 

Zap I: Turning Discussions into Actions

One of the reasons why we have meetings is to discuss and plan what needs to be done. Though it’s easier and faster to get everyone on Zoom and talk about what tasks must be completed, we never manage to get them all done — as the important information from conversations doesn’t easily get transferred into our work tools. 

You have to note down the tasks, assign the task, and then once the meeting’s over, manually import them to your project management tool. If you fail at even one of the steps, then the project can’t be checked off. 

The worst part is, even when you do everything, the assignee can’t revisit the part where the task has been discussed and get the context to do it better. Now, imagine doing this multiple times per day. No wonder why meetings feel unproductive and most of us hate them.

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If you have back-to-back meetings like me, then using the memory dumps is the only way. So, what one can remember will be done and what’s forgotten — is lost until someone remembers it in the next meeting. Well, not anymore. By integrating Grain with your project management tool (Asana, ClickUp, Linear, etc.), every deliverable you mention in a meeting can turn into a task.‍

Workflow:

Connect Grain with Linear to create tasks while you’re in a Zoom meeting. 

This workflow allows you to create a new task in Linear, or your project management tool of choice when you make a Grain highlight during a meeting (for this example we use the 'ticket' emoji).* This automatically creates a new task in Linear. The best part is, the video snippet of your team discussing the task will be instantly available for future reference.

‍*Sidenote: You can use an emoji of your choice and connect Grain with your team’s project management tool. 

Zap II: Meeting the Team Where They Are

Being a remote company enables you to hire and work with people across the globe. You can build a truly diversified team that refines your product to make it ‘ideal’ for a wider range of customers. 

But to ensure your remote team can contribute effectively and move the needle, you need to alter your communication workflow. One of the heartening trends we see in workplace communication — be it team meetings, training sessions, decision-making moments, is attempts to make them more “accessible” to fit the needs of employees from a variety of backgrounds, abilities, and learning styles. 

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"I have really seen that people are more motivated, productive, and work better together when you are meeting them where they are. This involves taking the time to understand people and their learning styles, as well as potentially making some changes to your communication workflow that are more supportive and more inclusive of that team.” - Kristen Gallagher, CEO, and founder of Edify

With Grain and Zapier, as soon as the meeting ends, you can share a recording with a transcript that’s far more accurate than most transcription providers — with the rest of your team. And, yes, the Grain recording page will have the highlights and notes you’ve taken during the call — so no one has to watch the full recording. 

Workflow:

‍You can automatically share a transcribed and annotated recording with your team once the meeting’s over. All you have to do is set up a Zap where every time a Grain recording has been added, a custom message with the recording link gets delivered via Email or a public Slack Channel.

Here’s a template you can use to get started with this automation.

Related: Steps to run the most productive meeting ever.

Zap III: Empowering Product Teams

Not empowering your product team to see what customers experience is more problematic than you think. It’s often overlooked, and even if you genuinely want to share customer feedback, it usually happens in the form of written notes and misses important context. Up to this point, sharing the actual voice of the user has been difficult for teams. 

This can turn into a costly mistake if you are the only one doing the customers research interviews. As Rob Fitzpatrick, author of The Mom Test calls, you’ll end up becoming “a single point of failure”.

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So, it’s equally important to capture and share the product feedback and bugs from customer calls with the product teams. By integrating Grain with Slack, you can turn customer feedback into a Grain highlight that gets automatically shared in the right Slack channel. Or, found a bug? Create a Grain highlight with a bug emoji that’ll trigger a Zap to create a bug report on your project management tool. 

Workflow:

Connect your team’s project management system to trigger a task whenever you create a Grain highlight with the bug emoji. You can use it to report a bug or even product suggestions from your customers while you’re in a meeting. As the highlight clip is included in the task that gets created, your product team can get the context as well! 

Zap IV: Leveraging the Voice of the Customers

For any startups aiming to build the best product and deliver a better customer experience, it’s important to leverage the ‘voice of the customers’. From understanding the users to coming up with the most impactful features, the voice of the customer plays a vital role in every phase of the product journey. 

"When you stop talking to customers, you stop getting insights about what's wrong and what's right with your product." - Michael Seibel, Managing Director, and Group Partner at Y Combinator.

As we all are working remotely, it’s never easier to get on a call w/ customers and learn what it takes to improve the product. And, that makes Grain — the most powerful tool to capture the “Voice of the Customer” today. 

Workflow:

Here is how we use it at Grain. We have had a #voice-of-the-user Slack channel for the past year and hands down, it’s our team’s favorite!

Every time any one of our customer-facing team members creates a Grain highlight with 🔥 emoji, the clip gets automatically shared in our #voice-of-the-user channel. We use it to gather customer feedback, video testimonials, and more. 

Want to set it up for your team? Learn how to set up a Zap to automatically share your customer quotes to the Slack channel here.

Zap V: Improving Team Alignment

Within an hour, most people will have forgotten an avg. of 50% of the information shared (see the forgetting curve). It is the reason why we can’t remember — even the important ideas discussed over the meetings that happened yesterday. 

And, one common response to deal with this problem is to share the full recording. If you have a recording and share it with the team, then they can revisit and ensure nothing gets lost, right? Well, not really as this is a significant data burden to put on anyone. Here’s a fact: no one watches or wants to watch a full Zoom recording. 

Enter Grain Stories! You can quickly compress an hour-long meeting into a 3-min video summary and automatically share it on your async communication tools like Slack or Teams. Grain Stories gets the entire team up to speed and everyone knows what’s been discussed and what the next steps in a project are! 

Workflow:

Grain allows you to create stories from several individual highlights that may all be viewed from one page. As soon as a story is created from Grain, a Zap will automatically notify a specific Slack channel (or other communication tools of your choice).

What’s Your Favorite Zap?

We are constantly learning new workflows from our power users and it’s exciting to see what they could do with Grain and Zapier. Thanks to automation and personalized workflows, not just ours, many teams that we talk to have fundamentally changed the way they collaborate during Zoom meetings. It’s easier to move from discussions to actions, hold people accountable for the tasks, understand the context, and do so much more. 

Have you created an interesting workflow with Grain and Zapier that you would like to share? Let us know!