The Meeting Minute

Blog

8 Meetings Worth Attending

Posted by | Business Tips, Meeting Tips | No Comments

It’s no secret that leaders have differing views on meetings.  Some meet far too often, while others don’t believe in meeting at all. Frankly, it’s not about how often you’re meeting, but rather what those meetings are accomplishing.

We wanted to see what type of meetings work at successful businesses, so we asked Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year winner, David Cummings about how he creates a healthy meeting culture.

David Cummings

Image Source- Creative Loafing Atlanta

David has been an entrepreneur for over a decade. In 2001, David founded Hannon Hill, which was recognized as the 247th fastest growing company in the U.S. by Inc. magazine. In early 2007, David co-founded Pardot, which was recognized by the Atlanta Business Chronicle as the fastest growing technology company in 2010. Pardot was named to the Inc. 500 in 2012 and shortly thereafter Pardot was acquired by ExactTarget in one of the largest SaaS acquisitions ever of a bootstrapped company. Most recently, David founded the Atlanta Tech Village, which at 103,000 sq ft is the largest technology entrepreneur center in the Southeast.

Read More

New Less Meeting Release – Making Meetings Easier to Manage

Posted by | Using Less Meeting | No Comments

Our spring release is out the door and chances are you’ve already noticed some of the changes around Less Meeting.

We started simplifying the meeting interface and also added a couple highly requested features to manage meeting invites.

Meeting Agenda Templates

Do you have the same template you use on all your sales calls? Want to share a standard status meeting template with your whole team?

New agenda templates let you create a standard agenda template and even share it with your team.

Agenda Template

Click “edit agenda” and choose Use an existing template or Save a new one

 

Resend Agendas & Invites

Often times empty meeting invites are added to the calendar to block off someone’s time. One of the unfortunate side effects of too many meetings!

We realize this is unavoidable, though, so want to make it easier for you to update meetings and communicate that to the rest of your team. Introducing the ability to send an updated meeting invite (including the .ICS file) and the ability to send the updated agenda to your attendees.

Updating the Meeting Invite

Updating the Meeting Invite

Update Invite

Check “Email Calendar Update” to resend the invite to attendees

Agenda Updates

Send your updated agenda to attendees

Simpler, Cleaner Notes & Minutes Interfaces

You’ll notice that the note taking interface is now more clean and inviting. We’ve cleaned out a lot of the noise including the multiple text boxes and excess labels. The result is a notes section letting you focus on what matters – the notes.

We’ve taken the popular drag & drop styles from the mobile apps and applied these to the web, so you should find it easier to drag & drop your notes, as well as the green note icon. Click & hold on any note – or the green note icon itself – and drag it to wherever you want it.

And when it’s time to send the meeting minutes, you’ll also notice a newly redesigned popup.

Sending Minutes

The redesigned Meeting Minutes interface

 

New PDF Export Format

Continuing with the theme of cleaner and simpler, the export to PDF has also been redesigned to match the styling of the export to Word.

Note that if the meeting hasn’t started you’ll still see the old format, which is designed for offline users who need to take notes by hand and enter them back into Less Meeting later.

Undo Deleted Meetings

Delete a meeting on accident?

Here’s how you can add back, or undelete, any of your meetings:

  1. Visit your Meetings page and check the “Deleted/Declined” filter option
  2. Click the “Remove Meetings” link
  3. You’ll notice a green “+” icon next to your deleted meeting – click this and your meeting will be re-added
Undelete meeting

Click the green “+” icon to readd your meeting

 

Let us know what you think of all these new features and as always, thanks for all the feedback that helped us plan this release.

 

The Secrets to Meetings at Successful Companies

Posted by | Meeting Tips | No Comments

less meeting people Companies that have a strong sense of purpose and great company culture have clearly defined expectations about how daily business should be conducted.

Whether it’s a daily status meeting or a powerpoint policy, successful companies make conscious decisions to implement an effective meeting process. Great companies simply don’t have time for poor meetings. Bad meetings hurt employee morale and waste valuable time, but yet few actually have a repeatable meeting model.

How do companies like Amazon, Apple & Google avoid terrible meetings? Read More

Words of Wisdom For The Project Manager

Posted by | Business Tips | No Comments
ElizabethHarrinProjectManager

This week we had the pleasure of speaking with Elizabeth Harrin about some of the pain points project managers face and how to fix them.

Elizabeth Harrin, MA, FAPM, MBCS is Director of The Otobos Group, a project communications consultancy specialising in copywriting for project management firms. She is the author of Shortcuts to Success: Project Management in the Real World, Social Media for Project Managers and Customer-Centric Project Management. She also writes the award-winning blog, A Girl’s Guide to Project Management. You can find Elizabeth online at www.otobosgroup.com or on Twitter @pm4girls.

As a project manager, what is the biggest problem you face in meetings? Read More