In this article, we’ll start by showing you how Geekbot, our free meeting scheduling app for Microsoft Teams and Slack, can help you and your team prepare for meetings.
Specifically, find out how Geekbot allows you to:
- Write agenda preparation questions (such as “What items should be on the agenda for this week’s standup?”) for each meeting.
- Decide who gets these questions and what channel their responses are broadcast on.
- Schedule when these questions are sent.
- And more.
Then , we’ll cover four other meeting scheduler apps for Microsoft Teams, so you can make an informed decision.
The best Microsoft Teams scheduler apps
- Geekbot
- Fellow
- Priority Matrix
- Decisions
- Polly
Note: Click here to create a free Geekbot account. All of our features are free for teams with up to 10 active participants. For larger teams, the price is $2.50 per user on the annual plan and $3.00 per user on the monthly plan.
1. Geekbot
Geekbot is our asynchronous meeting tool for Microsoft Teams and Slack. You can use it to run asynchronous standups, retrospectives, polls and surveys, and other types of remote work logs.
In addition, Geekbot can also help you prepare for meetings with agenda questions that are sent to participants in advance. In the following sections, we’ll show you exactly how this process works.
Click here to create a Geekbot account and set an agenda for your next meeting by following the steps below.
How to prepare and discuss your meeting agendas with Geekbot
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When you first start using Geekbot, you’ll notice that it offers pre-made templates for daily standups, retrospectives, surveys, and other use cases.
In this case, we want to create a custom meeting agenda by clicking the blue “Create your own” text above the templates.
From here, you can:
- Type your agenda questions.
- Choose which teammates receive questions in Microsoft Teams.
- Choose the Microsoft Teams channel where responses will be posted.
Write the questions on your agenda and select who gets them
With Geekbot , there is no limit to the questions you can include, so you can cover everything relevant to the next meeting.
For example, suppose you have a weekly meeting on Mondays so that everyone is lined up for the next one week. In that case, you can include questions such as:
- What items should be on the agenda for today’s weekly meeting?
- Is anyone facing challenges or obstacles that another member from the team can help?
- Anything we forgot to discuss or do last week?
(And any other questions that might be relevant.)
Additionally, every member of your Microsoft Teams channel is automatically synced with Geekbot. This makes it easy to select all meeting participants by typing their names.
You can also configure Geekbot to post the answers to these questions in any Microsoft Teams channel (eg, in the “Development” channel for weekly dev meetings ).
In addition, Geekbot can also help you prepare for upcoming meetings with questions like:
- What is the most important thing I have to discuss in today’s meeting? ?
- Who on the team will I need to collaborate with throughout the week?
Answering similar questions is a great way to prepare for meetings ahead of time, so you don’t have to to think of everything you want to say in the moment.
Schedule and send agenda questions
Geekbot allows you to send unique agenda questions or select a regular frequency in which the questions are sent. You can choose how often you want:
- Every day (for example, at 9:30 am to prepare for the daily meeting at 10:00 am)
- Every week (eg, at 2:00 PM every Thursday to prepare for a weekly retrospective at 3:00 PM)
- Every two weeks
- Every three weeks
- Every four weeks
- First week of the month
- Last week of the month
- Any other type of schedule you want
On the specified date and time, Geekbot notifies selected participants that it is time to answer questions via a Microsoft Teams DM .
Geekbot will then broadcast the responses in a Microsoft Teams channel of your choice.
The benefit of posting questions and agenda responses in a channel is that team members can be on the same page before the meeting. All team members can add items to the agenda or provide feedback on why certain items should not be included.
Optional follow-up reminders
In some cases, you (or your colleagues) may receive questions from the schedule while you are They are in a state of flux, client meeting, or other inconvenient situation. That’s why Geekbot also has optional reminders, which can help you remember to prepare for the meeting later, without interrupting your current task.
Again, these are completely optional, so they’re not annoying or annoying.
Geekbot is more than just a meeting scheduling tool
Geekbot it can help you in many different situations outside of meeting preparation. As we mentioned, you can use it to run asynchronous standups, retrospectives, surveys, and other types of remote work logs.
We explore these use cases in depth in these articles :
- Daily remote meetings: disadvantages of video calls