Meetings are part of the daily routine of many organizations – especially where boards, members, and various interest groups collaborate. At the same time, significant administrative effort often arises around meetings: preparation, minute-taking, and follow-up.
We spoke with Yannik Brunner, Deputy Managing Director and Mandate Manager at the office of the Trade Associations of St.Gallen. The office supports various trade and professional associations and organizes their meetings as well as all administrative association work. In the interview, Yannik explains how minutes were created in the past, how he became aware of Meeting Metrics, and why the effort for follow-up has been significantly reduced today.
Who are you – and what do you actually do?
My name is Yannik Brunner. I am Deputy Managing Director and Mandate Manager at the office of the Trade Associations of St.Gallen. We manage the association secretariat for various trade and professional associations.
This includes, among other things, the preparation, conduct, and follow-up of board meetings and assemblies, as well as the entire membership management with changes. Additionally, we also handle the financial and accounting matters of the associations.
What excites me most about my job is the varied and versatile work. No day is like the other. I enjoy the combination of organization, responsibility, and exchange with different industries. I support boards in managing their associations efficiently – and thus can make a direct contribution to strengthening trade.
How did your meetings run in the past?
In most meetings, I did not have a pre-prepared protocol. Therefore, I usually prepared a template for the minutes and wrote my notes directly into this template during the meeting.
The real work began afterward: during follow-up, all notes had to be carefully formulated and the spoken content sensibly summarized. Depending on the length of the meeting, I estimated 2 to 5 hours of effort per protocol.
The biggest time consumer was clearly the follow-up. If several meetings took place in one week, one often only got around to finishing the minutes the following week. This delayed the entire process – and participants had to wait correspondingly longer for the minutes.
How do you use Meeting Metrics specifically?
I became aware of Meeting Metrics at an event when the topic of AI came up in a conversation. At that time, I was already in a testing phase with another tool for minute-taking.
After a few attempts with Meeting Metrics, however, I quickly knew that it was the tool I had been looking for.
I started using Meeting Metrics shortly after its go-live. Since then, a lot has developed further. It is exciting to see how individual functions continuously improve.
Today, I find the desktop app particularly helpful, which works very comfortably. I am also eagerly awaiting the mobile app to process meetings, for example, on the way back to the office – including speaker recognition.
What has changed as a result?
Using Meeting Metrics has especially massively shortened the follow-up time of meetings.
The preparation still runs similarly to before. During the meeting, I note important topics that must be mentioned in the minutes. I then upload these notes together with the audio recording in the desktop app.
Today, I need at most one to two hours of processing time for meetings of varying lengths. During this time, I review the content and add individual agenda items where necessary.
And personally? Your outlook.
My goal is to further optimize the prompts so that I have to spend as little follow-up time as possible.
At the same time, it sometimes takes some getting used to: minutes can be shorter and structured differently today than many members or boards are accustomed to. However, I am convinced that this form will establish itself in the long term.
In addition, I want to use Meeting Metrics in smaller internal meetings in the future to reliably record discussed points and pending tasks.
Teams considering starting with Meeting Metrics, I would definitely recommend just trying it out. It takes some time to find the right prompts and to get the minutes exactly as you want them.
However, the template tool now works very well – much fits already on the first try. And the team behind Meeting Metrics responds quickly and very helpfully to support requests.
More time for the actual work
Yannik Brunner's example shows how administrative effort around meetings can be significantly reduced. When minutes are created faster, not only the minute-takers benefit, but also all participants who can access the most important results promptly.
Meeting Metrics supports teams in automatically documenting and structuring meetings – so that less time is spent on follow-up and more time remains for the actual work.
