How to Stay on Top of Your Business with Transcriptions

It is very easy to fall into the trap of dismissing transcriptions as just another one of the many things that may sound all well and grand and complicatedly awesome, but ultimately serves no purpose for you, your business, company or corporation, other than to leech off of your funds and give you another excuse to get more budget. It is also very easy to feel regret and humiliated when your competitors equipped with transcriptions from a proper transcriptions service grind you to the dust and leave you for the metaphorical carrions to devour.

When that happens, you may as well smash things around the office, for all the good that that will do for you (although it is heartily recommended that you not do so, and express your frustration at a more subdued level).

The benefits of transcriptions, especially at the corporate level, has often been discussed and debated upon. The benefits are many, yes, but without the proper knowledge of how to utilize conference call transcriptions, they may as well be junk or trash.

So, how exactly do you use corporate transcriptions? How should you utilize them so that they help you and your company reach the top and be the ones leaving others in the dust and to the metaphorical carrions, instead of the other way around?

1. Get your corporate transcriptions printed – or make digital devices comfortable for people

The first thing you must do is get all of the transcriptions – whether they’re from a conference call, a meeting, or an interview – that you will undoubtedly use printed. Digital copies of transcriptions are all well and good, but they do have limitations and negatives, one of the most glaring being the fact that it is rather tiring for the eyes to keep looking at a computer or tablet screen for too long while reading text. Besides, reading comprehension is better when people read from paper rather than from digitally. Not only that, people can also take around the paper stuff anywhere and review them – not that there’s no guarantee that they will do that, mind you.

Granted, the abovementioned step may be impossible to do if, say, your company’s striving for a paperless environment or there’s somehow no printer around anywhere in the office, in which case you’re stuck to doing things the digital way. If this is so, make sure that the settings of the digital devices used by employees can be adjusted. Simple things like adjusting the brightness of a computer screen or tilting a screen sideways can and will greatly boost digital reading comprehension and make the experience of reviewing even business papers at least tolerable, if not outright pleasant.

2. Summarize important points

Get a pen or highlighter or even an old-fashioned pencil – or use a digital highlighting tool of some kind – and get to underlining important points and, wherever pertinent, taking down notes and observations about them. Summarizing not only reduces clutter and removes pointless stuff, but it also allows people to review the material on hand again and again. Talk about killing two birds with one stone!

Of course, your people might be overworked or tired or simply don’t have the motivation to do another somewhat boring task. If so, then look to hire a meeting minutes service that can do the summarizing for you. Some transcription services, aside from offering transcriptions, can also offer this feature at a low additional cost, so definitely ask when you look to hiring them to do transcriptions for you.

3. Give every relevant person a copy of transcription

Your corporate transcriptions are utterly useless when they are simply lying around the office or taking up space in digital devices with no one but a select few having access to them. Therefore, give every person involved, with the proper security clearance, a copy of the transcriptions, so that they have a chance to review things and take notes themselves. They will thank you for it, and you will thank yourself for doing it later on.

4. When someone asks for a copy, give it to them

Now, when an important person in the company – maybe your boss, or if you are the boss, a shareholder or partner – or your customer asks for notes on a meeting that was conducted a few days ago perhaps, what do you do? Do you refuse them? Do you say, “No, I don’t have a copy or anything, sorry,” Of course not! Communicating valuable knowledge about the company is extremely important to every stakeholder and relays transparency and willingness to cooperate for the success of the business or organization.

5. Make sure that meetings and conference calls go okay

Having a transcription of meetings and conference calls of your company is all well and good, but they can only really help you when they are of high quality. Aside from making sure that you hire a good transcriptions service, which should be your number one priority when choosing who to hire, make sure that all meetings and conference calls are properly arranged and moderated, and that all participants stay on track. What use is a meeting where all the participants only discuss about that department-wide dinner last Saturday, or a conference call where everything goes wrong? Keep in mind the many things that you have to do to ensure that meetings will go well to get high quality recordings for conference call transcriptions.

There are, of course, a few other things that can be mentioned here, but the abovementioned ones are really the most important to consider. Keep them in mind, and remember them next time you get corporate transcriptions made by a transcriptions service.