Office meeting.
These two words are often met with dread as employees picture hours spent sitting in a windowless room with trays of bland food and boring conversation — but it doesn’t have to be that way.
By harnessing a little local technology, companies both large and small can find ways to craft meetings that don’t suck. From ordering customized meals to booking swanky downtown office spaces, the following five startups offer a suite of tools that promise to make office meetings a whole lot better.
ezCater prides itself on providing business catering “made ez” — whether you’re trying to feed a client meeting or your entire office. The fast-growing Boston startup offers a nationwide marketplace for business catering, including online ordering, ratings and reviews, as well as customer service for business people anywhere in the United States. The best part: ezCater’s rewards program earns you 1 to 5 percent of what you spend in ezRewards points for every order placed, and these points can be redeemed for Amazon gift cards.
Startups talk a lot about collaborative work, but no company embodies the concept quite like Smartsheet. That’s because the company builds and supports a leading enterprise-scale work management platform that enables organizations to plan, track and automate their work, implementing ideas into action more quickly and efficiently. Founded in 2005, Smartsheet’s collaboration tools are currently being used by big names like Netflix, Cisco, Behr and Hilton.
Videoconferencing can be pretty terrible. Sometimes the sound is off, or you can’t see your co-workers clearly, and you leave the meeting wondering if you got anything valuable from it at all. Enter, Owl Labs. Founded by iRobot alumni Max Makeev and Mark Schnittman, Owl Labs has made a video conferencing solution called “Owl” specifically designed to improve meetings for remote workers. The IoT video conferencing hardware tool uses a USB audio and video device to show attendees the whole room and automatically focus on people as they speak so that it’s almost like you’re there.
Need to schedule a meeting, fast? Robin Powered offers employees a simple room-booking and analytics tool that works for mobile, web and tablets. For those using the Robin mobile app, iBeacons detects when users are in a room and books their calendars automatically, letting their team members know who and what space is available in real-time. The startup also sends smart notifications and location-based reminders to keep everyone on track.
We’ve all been to a meeting that ends with trays and trays of untouched food left to waste, but Boston startup Forkable is hoping to change that. While it can be tough for office catering to meet the dietary needs of individual workers, Forkable aims to make every employee happy and satisfied by eliminating lunch waste with its customizable meals. Employees select their meal preferences and receive a single-serving dish. As the platform accumulates more data, it crafts better meals for each individual.
