One-on-one meetings are a great way of building synergy in a workforce and coordinating employees. These meetings allow managers to enhance team productivity, give feedback, and assist the team in actively gaining more from their work.
However, with the number of employees and the variety of one-one meetings, you need the proper meeting tools to make them effective.
This is especially important these days when hybrid meetings are common practice. Even if you organize more onsite one-on-ones, you need these tools to reduce manual workload and maintain a high level of organization.
In this guide, we have curated the best one-on-one meeting manager tools for different functions to help you save time, arrive at the meeting prepared, and improve meeting productivity.
Best overall one-on-one manager tool for meetings: Airgram
Automation is one of the goodies that come with the advancement of technology, and this can be employed in one-on-one meetings. One of the best tools that helps automate your meetings is the Airgram meeting assistant.
Starting from joining meetings to planning and execution, Airgram automates everything. What’s more, it is a meeting facilitator that offers the most critical features needed to make a meeting successful.
1. Collaborate on meeting agenda
A carefully-planned meeting agenda is the basis of a successful one-on-one meeting as it sets clear expectations for the meeting purpose and what is to be discussed.
With Airgram, you have the ideal tool to share your one-on-one meeting agenda in advance and get input from all meeting participants so that everyone can get prepared.
Also, Airgram has built-in agenda templates that you can directly apply to use to help speed up the process. This saves you the stress of brainstorming and building a template from scratch.
2. Meeting recording
It is virtually impossible to remember everything said in a meeting. This is especially true in virtual meetings when there might be one or two distractions.
This is where you will need the meeting recording feature of Airgram. It allows you to record Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams calls in high-definition quality, and the recordings are immediately accessible for review and sharing when the meeting is over.
3. Real-time meeting transcription
Another impressive feature of Airgram is the real-time transcription, which is highly praised by its users.
The Airgram tool will convert every conversation into text, so you don’t have to struggle with taking notes but stay engaged in the discussion. What’s more, you can search through, edit, and comment on the transcript afterward.
It offers transcription in eight major languages, including English, Spanish, French, Chinese, and German. This breaks down the language barrier and helps to improve the inclusivity and diversity in your company.
4. Note-taking
Note-taking is an excellent way of jotting down valuable information during a meeting. The AIrgram offers an integrated notepad that allows every meeting attendee to take meeting notes simultaneously and share ideas by leaving comments, with no need to switch to other tools.
To make things easier, it allows you to add text, agenda, images, and other useful information with just a slash command.
On a final note, Airgram is no doubt a superb one-on-one meeting tool, but not limited to this. Whether you are a manager who needs to hold team meetings weekly or a customer success manager who has meetings with clients all the time, Airgram is the one tool you need to automate all aspects of your meetings and make every meeting worth the time.
Meeting scheduling tools
One-on-one meetings should occur frequently. As such, you need the right scheduling tools to request a meeting quickly and keep everything organized.
To create the perfect sync, it is better to use calendar tools that can be shared across the organization. This can notify you and the employee involved when the time draws nearer.
To save you time on research, below are some of the best scheduling tools for one on one meetings you can use.
1. Google Calendar
Google Calendar is a free service developed by Google that allows you to “quickly schedule meetings and events and get reminders about upcoming activities”.
While setting up the meeting, you can choose to notify the attendees with an automatic invitation email and also attach notes or resource links in the comment area for everyone to read.
It allows you to set recurring events, so you don’t have to schedule them manually every time. This tool also provides meeting planner features like customized time slots and shareable booking links. Google Calendar is just about the most effective scheduling tool for those who need to organize and simplify their hectic schedules.
2. Calendly
Calendly (not Calendarly, many people spell it incorrectly) is a popular platform for scheduling meetings and making appointments. With simple email signup, you are free to use the tool.
It is especially suitable for one-on-one meetings as you just need to set up the meeting type and other details, then send the link to the person who will have a meeting with you so that they can see when you're available and select a time slot. This will prevent any back and forth when scheduling a meeting.
Calendly works well for scheduling meetings with any person, whether in the same organization or not. It is especially useful in today’s fast-paced workplace to ensure that the employee does not forget the meeting.
Meeting agenda tools
Things frequently get lost in the shuffle when there is no clear structure in place to handle the discussions and decisions made during meetings. But with the right meeting agenda tools, you can stay on track and ensure all preplanned details are discussed.
These tools also improve productivity. Below are two of the best one-on-one meeting agenda tools.
1. Fellow
The Fellow app is a tool that helps a manager to collaborate with employees to create an agenda before one-on-one meetings. This helps everyone to be on the same page and prepare ahead of the meeting.
Also, Fellow eases the agenda creation process by offering built-in agenda templates and topics to cover in your one-on-one meeting, so you don’t have to start from scratch. What’s more, you can customize and save these templates for future use, which makes agenda creation faster for recurring meetings.
2. Hypercontext
Hypercontext is a meeting management application designed primarily for managers. This free tool allows you to create and share meeting agendas with an employee ahead of the meeting. With this, everyone knows what to discuss in the meeting and can view and add more agenda items if necessary.
It also has meeting templates built inside the app that save you time in developing an agenda. Moreover, the Hypercontext app helps you to stay on course during the meeting with its action item tracking feature.
Meeting notes tools
The practice of taking notes has long been essential for effective teamwork and communication. In today’s digital age, doing it the traditional way can make you lose focus during meetings.
And this is why you need the best meeting note-taking tools to do the job for you. Listed below are two of the best software you can employ.
1. Notion
Notion is widely used by teams for a few significant objectives, such as tasks, team wikis, and notes.
To take notes, simply click the “New Page” button in the bottom left corner and opt for a blank page. Notion offers various templates for different teams to make your note-taking process easier.
During the one-on-one meeting, you can use Notion to create and edit notes simultaneously with an employee. This makes sharing of ideas and setting of action items easy. Notion also allows you to add images, tables, to-do lists, and other types of content with a simple slash command.
2. Hugo
Hugo is also a meeting management tool that helps you to take notes easily during meetings and also organize them in one place.
Hugo will organize your notes according to companies, attendees, and other important parameters, which ensures that you can access them easily when you need them.
What’s best about this software is that it will identify notes for recurring meetings so that you can review the notes from previous meetings and know what’s next. Lastly, you can easily share the meeting notes afterward with the employee to keep them aligned.
Succeed at your one-on-ones with the right tools
One-on-ones can be pretty hectic and disorganized due to the frequency of the meeting. Also, as a manager, the number of employees you have this meeting with can make it difficult to keep track of vital info.
However, with the right management tools and a complete one-on-one meeting guide, you can automate just about everything. With the Airgram meeting productivity tool, you don’t have to worry about getting meeting reminders, sharing agendas, or taking meeting notes anymore.
It takes care of the most important aspects of one-on-one and other meetings, from planning to execution and feedback.
Michael started his career as a product manager and then developed a passion for writing. He has been writing on technology, remote working, productivity, etc., hoping to share his thoughts with more people.
