“Automation means a lot to us here at BlueLabs - especially as engineers – and I immediately felt that Meetical will add lots of value for us.” 

As a fully remote company, BlueLabs manages a growing team of 15 developers, with staff currently in Austria, Malta, Romania, Slovenia, Spain and the UK. 

The team already uses Confluence, which is how they came to hear about Meetical Meetings for Confluence. A good communication architecture and meeting design is especially important for fully-remote working models. BlueLabs needs software tools that make meetings easy to manage, whether all-hands or 1-on-1 meetings.

Problem 

Right from the start, BlueLabs knew they were going to be fully remote. This allows them to recruit the best talent possible, rather than being limited to a specified location. Working completely remote means doing things differently from day one. 

Remote work puts a much greater emphasis on communication. Many founders who’ve done this successfully for many years say you need to over-communicate. At the same time, documenting relevant results and decisions taken in meetings is key, which is how it started with BlueLabs. 

At the beginning, this focus on manual continuous documentation of every meeting was ok, but didn’t last. Not when the team shifted into a more intense phase of work. Processes started to be forgotten, as the focus moved onto actual development. 

Unfortunately — as anyone knows who's been a part of or managed a remote team — once processes falter, the actual work you are doing suffers too. As Enrique Fernández, VP of Engineering said in a customer interview:

“We missed documenting important decisions, our action points got lost and we didn't have the minutes of our meetings. We all acknowledged that that was an issue.” – Enrique Fernández, VP of Engineering

A solution had to be found, one that would prevent them from overlooking or forgetting important action items. 

Within Confluence, you can document meetings and make notes. However, as Fernández points out:

“Creating Meeting Notes on Confluence and linking that page in the invite were additional manual steps that you often postpone and forget. The result was that we did not always have a meeting page at hand when we needed it.” – Enrique Fernández, VP of Engineering

Solution 

As BlueLabs were already using Confluence and Google Calendar, the solution ideally had to fit within the workflow they already had. It had to be easy-to-use, and not feel like they were adding extra work items to the team to document every meeting. 

Once BlueLabs found Meetical, it immediately solved these problems. It helped them put theory into practice, and once again document everything without doing extra work. Enrique Fernández, VP of Engineering explains the value of an automated solutions for meetings.

“Meetical is the glue that sits between Confluence and Google Calendar. It acts as a middleman, and is so well integrated so nobody don't really notices it as a new tool to learn. It's very seamless and deeply integrated. It just works. And that's what we were looking for!” – Enrique Fernández, VP of Engineering at BlueLabs


Outcome 

BlueLabs didn't want to add an extra tool to their tech stack if they could avoid it. Doing so means extra work and something else to learn. As most software development companies know, less is more when it comes to tools, because most often use so many in the average working day. 

Meetical is an ideal solution. It keeps meeting notes within Confluence and connects directly with Google Calendar. And it doesn't involve learning a new tool or taking extra working steps. Additionally the automation feature for recurring meetings contributed to increasing the number of meetings that were documented and had good minutes.

Now every recurring 1-on-1 meeting gets prepared and documented almost automatically. Other meetings, like lean coffee meetings, all-hands meetings, and impromptu meetings can be prepared and pages get shared timely. The best part is, that all these features are directly available from Google Calendar, thanks to the Confluence Chrome extension. 

Meeting leaders can easily create and share pages when the meeting invite is sent. And participants can access these pages with a direct link available on the meeting event, without searching for them.

Processes at BlueLabs now encourage anyone attending any meeting to drop information, or an idea, or new agenda item into the meeting page. After every meeting, the notes are automatically shared, to ensure any “hot” agenda item is dealt with as quickly as possible. Meetical works brilliantly for the challenges BlueLabs were facing, as the testimonial outlines below. 

BlueLabs testimonial: Meetical for Confluence

“I would definitely recommend it to anyone who uses Confluence for meetings and wants a better way of running meetings and recording notes automatically.” – Enrique Fernández, VP of Engineering at BlueLabs

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