New Release: Announcing Google Integration and Other Great Updates

The ability to automatically sync your meetings and tasks with Google; custom meeting minute templates; updates to Daily Digest settings for your meeting attendees; and of course a number of helpful bug fixes?

Yep, we've got all that and more in the latest LessMeeting release. Check out the details below...

Google Apps Integration with LessMeeting

We've been excited about this for awhile. LessMeeting is now fully integrated with GMail & Google Apps. If you use Google Calendar for your scheduling you'll love this new addition.

As you'd expect with LessMeeting, it's super simple and easy to use. You actually don't need to do anything once you get set up: your meetings will automatically sync from Google to LessMeeting and your tasks will automatically sync from LessMeeting back to Google.

To get started, just turn on Google Apps for your account. That's it. Thanks to all our Google Apps Beta testers who helped us make sure the integration went smoothly.

Quick Tip: Add your agenda right into the Google Calendar so it automatically shows up in LessMeeting (More details here).

Customized Meeting Minutes
Ever wanted a little more control on how your meeting minutes email looks? You can now add a custom logo, change the color scheme, or hide parts of the minutes template. Maybe you'd prefer to hide the MQS so you don't remind everyone how late you were starting the meeting!

This will be especially useful for Enterprise customers who want to have a standard company-wide meeting minutes template. Control the new look from the meeting closeout screen (below).

Daily Digest Changes
We previously added a setting to turn off the Daily Digest for your meeting attendees. We've heard from a number of you that you liked that change, but sometimes want to be able to do the same for a specific meeting.

Now you can! During the meeting closeout simply uncheck the box below.

Should I Bring My Laptop To Your Meeting?

A couple weeks back I was in a client meeting giving a presentation of two alternate solutions. Afterward I asked the lead architect for her recommendation.

"Uhhhhh, can you repeat that again real quick?" she blankly asked.

Seriously?! I've just spent the last 10 minutes describing everything, but you were too busy hacking away on your Blackberry. Wouldn't it be so much better if we could just ban technology altogether in meetings?

Well......maybe not.

Please Check Your Phones at the Door?

You've likely witnessed some variation of this mandate to ban computers & phones from meetings. This isn't realistic though. Nor does it even solve the root cause.

And do I really want to go back to hand writing all my notes & then typing them up afterward? Or do I want to deal with printing handouts instead of emailing a PowerPoint? And what happens when someone didn't do their prep work and we need to look up a stat real quick?

So, banning devices from meetings might not be that great after all.

Don't Boycott Technology!
In fact it does more harm than good by prohibiting technology in meetings - you lose all the benefits technology brings. Remember 37signals' Boycott A Meeting Day? Instead of not having any meetings at all, we realized it's better to focus on making our meetings better. Same situation here.

We should stop trying to go cold turkey and instead focus on moderation and setting boundaries! I recently saw a great post that set rules for what you CAN and SHALL NOT do with your devices during meetings:

You Shall Not:

• You shall not surf the web during a meeting.
• You shall not send an instant message to anyone in the meeting.
• You shall not send text messages with any mobile device.

You Can:

• You can research topics that are relevant to the meeting.
• You can type notes.
• You can share information from your device to a projector for all to see.

Take a moment to also consider why you're not getting the attention you think you deserve. Maybe the person sending an email from their phone shouldn't have been invited to your meeting. Or ask, is the meeting itself really necessary?

So remember, keep bringing your phones and computers to meetings (e.g. LessMeeting), just stop looking at those Lolcats.


image: TIME

Managing the Meeting Hog

Ball Hogs & Meeting Hogs
Dave Berri over at Freakonomics recently came up with an interesting analogy between meetings and the NBA...yes the National Basketball Association. He argues that ball hogs and never-ending meetings suffer from the same problem: a combination of over confidence + under competence.

In basketball, ball hogs take too many of their team's shots during a game even though they have a terrible true shooting percentage.

In meetings, meeting hogs have ideas for every solution and don't stop talking, despite the fact that studies show their ideas aren't always that good.

In both cases, people take the shotgun approach to success hoping that one of their shots/comments out of the dozen that miss will go in. In the process they bring down the effectiveness of the whole team.

But Ball Hogs Are Still the MVPs!

The problem isn't just that these players end up missing a lot of shots they take. What's dangerous is that these players are typically rewarded for this behavior with MVPs and promotions (same study).

What to do then? First, keep in mind it's OK that our all star ball hogs take a lot of shots. This isn't all bad - every team needs someone who's not afraid to take that low probability shot at a chance of success.

Next, recognize the goal isn't to stop the meeting hog's ideas. Instead, think about ways to prevent them from bringing down the rest of the meeting. You know, by:

• Wandering off topic
• Monopolizing attention & blocking others' ideas, and
• Dragging meetings out much longer than they should be

Don't Stop the Talking, Manage It
What next? Well, it's important to strike a balance. Let these folks continue to come up with their ideas. Again, you need someone who's not afraid to suggest some crazy solution that only has a 25% chance of working - because it might actually be the winner.

BUT! You must also make sure the rest of the team can vet these ideas and also come up with their own. And the best way to do that isn't to stop the talking, but to manage it.

Looking for ideas on how to manage talking in a meeting? Check out Blake's post on how to silence a talkative meeting attendee to get started!