Attendee Diet: Trim 12 People From Your Meeting Waistline In 4 Weeks

Have you ever found yourself sitting through a conference call with 20+ people when you were actually doing working instead of paying attention to the meeting?

POP QUIZ - You get called on… but you were not paying attention.  What do you do:

(A) Tell the moderator that you missed the question, ask them to repeat it.

(B)  Give a random status update on one of your 3 projects (hoping no one else is actually paying attention).

(C)  Sit quietly and hope that they assume you have dropped off the call or are stuck on mute.

(D)  Ask the group "Why do we have 27 of our best employees sitting through a two hour meeting when the only update that matters to each person is their 3 minutes of status?

Are you guilty of answering with (A), (B), or(C)?

You would have liked to answer with option (D), but I am guessing that like most other people you were too scared to call out the status quo without a great reason why it should be questioned.

Out of all of the people we have talked with at the 500+ companies that have signed up for LessMeeting, I think every one of them has said that they sit in too many meetings with too many people.

The worst part is… they all acknowledged that those meetings are the suck*.

Seriously,  when was the last time you heard anyone say: "This meeting was OK, but if we added 15 or so more people it would have been a lot more productive"... NEVER

Key Questions For You To Answer

How do you build the ammunition and credibility to be able to step up with Answer (D)?

Alternatively, how do you change the culture of the people you work with to avoid these massive 25 person wastes of time?

If you would like the answers to these questions, keep scrolling down and read the rest of this post.  Otherwise, please return to ignoring the conference call you should be listening to…

Death to the Informational Meeting?

Al Pittampalli over at Work Awesome has started an interesting meeting edict: Cancel all further informational meetings!

In an era of social media abundance, where so many rich methods of communication are everywhere (e-mail, recorded audio, recorded video, etc.) why are we still herding people together to hear policy updates? Meeting for the purpose of disseminating information is like washing your dishes with Evian water. It works, but it’s expensive and slightly ridiculous..

This is easier said than done though, as Al admits.  There are two big barriers in the way:

1. Convenience - People will need to take time to write an e-mail or memo instead of just discussing the matter in a meeting.


2. Fear - People are afraid that if they don't hold a meeting no one will listen to what they have to say.

I think Al's second fear is somewhat justified.  Think about it - how often have you ignored a simple status e-mail that you should have spent 15 minutes to read?  Be honest!

With the right company culture and commitment from team members this idea hits at some interesting points that are right on board with LessMeeting.  Let's remove toxic meetings that drag down productivity and instead focus on quality meetings with clear goals, decisions, and takeaways.

New Feature Highlight: Daily Digest Settings

As we highlighted earlier in the week, we've just released a bunch of updates to LessMeeting.  Today we'd like to quickly detail one of those.

Daily Digests for Your Attendees
Previously you've been able to control a number of your own Daily Digest settings: how many Todos to include, how far forward to look, whether you even want to get your daily digest sent to you...

There's now a new Daily Digest option to control the emails for your meeting attendees too. 

When "Send Todo Reminders to my Meeting Attendees not registered with LessMeeting" is checked, anyone in your meeting who is assigned a Todo will receive a Daily Digest until their Todos are complete.  This includes both people that have signed up for LessMeeting as well as people that have not signed up

We have received requests to not have LessMeeting Daily Digest emails sent to attendees who haven't registered with LessMeeting yet (and as a result might not be expecting a LessMeeting email).  If that's the case, simply uncheck the same option.   

Note - this only applies to attendees in meetings who have not signed up for LessMeeting.

As always, keep the feedback coming and we'll keep listening.

New Release: Better Outlook Performance, Requested Features, and Google Apps Beta

We are very excited to announce that we are releasing a new version of LessMeeting today. This includes updates to both the Outlook plugin and the web app.

Requested Features
Our users have always had great ideas and suggestions about ways to improve LessMeeting. Here are some of the ones we have included in this release:

The Dashboard has been simplified to focus on upcoming meetings and action items.

We've also updated the attendance list with two new features.

• The attendance list now shows the organizer at the top followed by the rest of the attendees listed alphabetically
• A new check all / uncheck all link on the attendance list, which makes it easier to manage meetings with a large number of attendees

International symbols and other languages now appear correctly in minutes emails too.

Last, we've added a new setting to the Daily Digest (available on the Settings page).  In addition to managing your own Daily Digest settings, you can now turn off Todo Reminders for attendees in your meetings.

As always, if you have any additional feature requests we'd be glad to hear about them!

Improved Performance for Outlook Plugin

We know that some of you have been experiencing performance issues with Outlook, so today we're releasing a new Outlook plugin that will run much faster. The new plugin should install automatically after a few days, or you can download it now here.

If you are still seeing performance issues, please let us know by emailing us.

Other Fixes

We've made a couple of small bug fixes for Firefox users and CC users:

• Meeting note no longer loses cursor focus in Firefox 7.0
• Small bugs related to meeting sync using cc@lessmeeting.com

Beta Testing for Google Apps Integration

We are working on Google Apps integration so that users that have Gmail can sync their calendars without including cc@lessmeeting.com in each meeting. If you are interested in this please let us know and we can discuss setting up the beta test.

WANTED!! Help Stop these Meeting Villains

Look familiar?  You've probably dealt with one or more of these bad meeting suspects before.  Maybe we called them by different names or saw them in different forms, but either way we've all seen them.

Putting Names To Faces

They've interrupted your presentations, hijacked your discussions and played Angry Birds on their phones across the table from you. In one way or another they've helped make a good meeting turn bad.

Now it's time to put names to faces in an effort to help you tackle some well known meeting villains. 

Superhero Meeting Powers
We'll feature each meeting villain in a series of coming posts.  Since we can't be there to help in person, we want to give you the abilities (super powers, if you will!) to deal with these meeting villains first hand.

1. Villain Vision - Villains can be hard to spot so we'll help you identify these characters with some common symptoms. 


2. Mental Powers - Once you know how to spot a meeting villain, we'll show you how to handle them.  While your first reaction may be that it's just a personnel issue that can't be fixed, we'll show you how adding the right meeting structures can overcome the villains' disruptive powers.  

First up, "Meeting Hijacker".

Stay tuned for more...

Don't Andy Bernard Your Meeting Plan

Did you catch the new season of The Office recently?  Season 8 has started and we find out that (drum roll, please...) Andy Bernard is the new regional manager for Dunder Mifflin's Scranton branch.

And already we can learn a thing or two from Andy.  Or rather, what not to do.

Andy's Plan

I'll set the stage.  Andy wants to have an important meeting (aka "casual chit chat") with his new boss, the new Sabre CEO, Robert California.

He then lets us in on his "plan" for his meeting with Robert:

1. Can I get everyone an extra long Columbus Day weekend?
2. Connect with the guy. What does he think of me?
3. We lost our biggest client (time permitting)

"Time Permitting?"

Technically I suppose this is a plan, albeit an absolutely terrible one.  Where to begin?

He's hidden the most important topic, losing their biggest client!, at the end of the meeting.  Minor detail, right?  He's wasting time, to convince Robert to take away even more time with an extra vacation day.  And he has to setup a dedicated meeting just to get his boss to like him.

Sure we've said before how important a meeting plan is.  And yes we're glad to see Andy's effort at following that process.  But a good meeting is so much more than just following the rules - actual content still matters!

For a good laugh check out the full episode (or skip to the 5:20 mark) for more of the Nard Dog in action: http://www.nbc.com/the-office/video/the-list/1357517.