remco
Remco Mosselman
Co-Owner at Stock Doorbraak Trainingen

Just for clarity, the tool is not mine or anything of that kind. I am just a user that uses this tool for my board meetings and the concultancy and recruitment work that I do.

In my personal experience this is not the tool that instantly cuts meeting times in half. But if you really want to cut down useless meeting time with the whole group it can help a lot. If everyone in the group uses this tool with the same mindset… you wil surely carve out half of the time you are in meetings and create effective discussion sessions.

Three things that I benefit the most from while using Yabbu:

  1. During meetings you hardly loose time to sharing information and opinions. Everybody does that in advance. All participants can also respond, ask questions about the information that is shared, or state their viewpoints. Consent for desicions is mostly given during the preparation phase and therefor no longer needed during the live meeting.
  2. Minutes are done and available as soon as the meeting closes in Yabbu. The participants can read it back including comments at any time (and any place because ti’s also available as mobile app). In short there is historical insight in an organised manner. That is a huge plus from historical accuracy and compliance point of view.
  3. Besides that you loose the unstructured email avalanches that are created by everyone that comments on the agenda via reply, reply-all, and forward. People are often reacting on points that are already cleared. And the secretary of the meeting tries to combine all input into one overview and distributes that back to everybody just before the meeting…

My personal quest

As secretary of the board I once started to use an online forum (at the time tools like this were not available yet) to be able to prepare meetings where everybody could see, respond, react, share and important: have a historical trail. Later there were specific tools developed for it and I used one till it was announced to be discontinued (support and coverage ended per December 2019).

The best alternative

Looking for an alternative, because I really did not want to work without someting similar, I found about 30 tools. After checking out websites, reading manuals, feature lists and specs, I chose 4 tools that I would test for 3 months (it was quite some work to keep 4 tools updated with meetings, minutes, comments etc, but it was worth the insight it brought).

After 2 months of testing one of the tools started to stick out in positive sense. The fluidity, the flexibility, the adaptability en the live responsiveness of what other participants add (comment, documents, points) made it quite easy to let go of the other three tools.

Inform without disturbing

The possibilities to be able to use teams within the tool make it a party for people who do not want to receive thousands of messages per month, but still want to be able to watch and share their knowledge and information on topics that are relevant to them.

Compliance and overview

The overview with decisions (and tasks and documents) across a series of meetings, including reason and substantiation, is really very useful in the context of compliance. Being able to join people without having to create all kinds of accounts or edit an access and rights matrix is ​​also very nice.

A huge time saver

You can of course make a live connection during your meeting with the usual (video) software. This is a tool that helps most in preparing and finalization of meetings, so that you can significantly reduce your total time spent.

An inclusive process

An interesting side effect is that people prepare more thorough, so that a larger group participates and the quality increases. Participants get energy because they are given the space to contribute, and because the points that remain after the preparation are really worth everyone’s time.