8 Ways Otter Makes You a Better Employee

The past year and a half of the COVD-19 pandemic has ushered in nothing short of a paradigm shift for modern work — and it’s not going away any time soon.  Although some businesses are slowly returning to in-office settings, most companies plan to operate either fully remote or in a hybrid model for the foreseeable future.

As a result, employees should expect remote meetings via Zoom, Webex, Teams, and similar tools to persist — or even become a staple of business in the long run.

If that thought stresses you out, there are tools that can help you manage the specific challenges that come along with remote team meetings. Otter is one that can help you adjust to this new reality by mitigating burnout, improving your performance, and increasing meeting accessibility.

Here are eight specific ways Otter helps make you a better employee:

1. Pay Attention to Your Meeting Participation

One of the biggest concerns many businesses have when it comes to remote work is that employees will slack off and won’t be as involved with their work as they would be if they were in the office.

Otter can help you get ahead of this fear — or simply help you understand where you can improve professionally. When you record your meetings with Otter, you can use the ‘speaker talk time’ feature to gauge your participation level, relative to other participants.

If, for example, you attend a meeting with three participants, but notice later that you only participated 10% of the time, that might be a sign that you need to be more proactive in future meetings.

2. Reduce Fatigue from Back-to-Back Meetings

Meetings are a vital part of business, but too many of them can take a real toll on your health and well-being. In fact, a recent Otter survey indicated that 71% of employed Americans would rather go to the dentist than sit through hours of back-to-back meetings. Of the survey respondents, 19% said that consecutive meetings make them feel distracted, 34% said they reduce their energy, and 32% said they induce stress.

That’s a major problem: if you’re experiencing negative side effects from back-to-back meetings, you won’t be able to absorb the important information that’s being presented and discussed as effectively as you could otherwise.

Use Otter to automatically transcribe meetings and take notes on your behalf. Not only can live transcription help you stay on top of what’s being discussed, the record of your conversation can be helpful if you need to come back and review it later on.

3. Stay on the Same Page with Colleagues Across Time Zones

The internet has made it possible for teams to operate across multiple states, countries, and time zones. But although there are many benefits to building international teams, coordinating schedules across the globe can be challenging and lead to burnout. If you have to get up at 3 am to make meetings with team members in other time zones, you’re eventually going to experience fatigue and decreased productivity.

If your participation isn’t necessary at a meeting, send Otter Assistant to take notes on your behalf. Otter Assistant can automatically join meetings on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco Webex and record the call — even if you’re not there. Later, you can read through what was discussed or share the transcription with any other team members that missed the call.

Otter Assistant can also be helpful if you need to join a meeting late that’s already in progress or leave a meeting that’s running over to join another session. As you join the next meeting, simply open the transcript and read what’s already happened to catch up. Then, when your last meeting is finished, you can return to review the transcript of the meeting you left — Otter Assistant will have continued taking notes on your behalf until the meeting wrapped up.

4. Coach Yourself with Call Recordings

Whether you’re a sales rep, team leader, manager, or C-suite executive, listening back to prior conversations you’ve led can be a great way to coach yourself to better performance.

But listening through recordings is inefficient — the average speaking speed is around 150-160 words per minute, but the average reading speed is roughly 250-300 words per minute. With transcriptions from Otter, you can read through past conversations at a much faster pace; typically double the speed of listening through them, to gain important insights more quickly.

5. Stay Focused by Eliminating Meeting Minutes

In most meetings, it’s one participant’s responsibility to take notes as a record of what transpired (typically referred to as the ‘meeting minutes’).

But if you’ve ever been the person forced to take notes, you know how difficult this can be: if you’re distracted taking notes, it’s easy to miss important information. You may have also found it difficult to speak up and contribute your own ideas, which could cause the whole team to miss out on potentially great suggestions.

Again, Otter can eliminate this issue. With automatic notes and transcriptions, everyone in the meeting can pay full attention, and the minutes will be written up automatically and sent out to all parties.

6. Enjoy Greater Meeting Accessibility

If you’re hearing impaired, everything from audio-only calls (which limit opportunities for lip reading) to poor connections that cause audio distortion or interruptions can make remote meetings more challenging.

Thankfully, Otter not only allows you to read transcriptions of previous meetings, it also provides live transcriptions in real-time, making your meetings more accessible to you and any other hearing-impaired participants.

7. Find Key Information with Search

One of the biggest problems with audio recordings is that they can be hard to sort through: If you’re looking for a specific portion of an interview, you’ll either need to listen through the whole thing or aimlessly skip around until you find it.

Otter’s search function eliminates this issue. Instead of clicking through multiple transcripts and different points in your meeting recording to find “that one time you said….”, you can use Otter’s search feature to type in a keyword and see all the times it appears. This can drastically improve efficiency, and since the transcription is automatic, you won’t have to pick and choose which recordings are worth transcribing.

8. Learn in Your Preferred Style

Finally, decades of research have shown that people learn differently: some absorb information better when they can hear it, while others are more visual learners. Unfortunately, most workplace training and meetings don’t take this into account and only accommodate one style.

If you’re someone who learns best by reading, Otter can help you transcribe meetings, training sessions, workshops, and more. In this way, Otter can make you more productive, since you’ll be able to take in the information being shared more fully.

Simply put, Otter can help you be a better employee and perform at the top of your game. Give Otter’s Free or Pro plan a try to see how AI meeting transcriptions can make you more efficient and productive.