In this episode I share a super easy way to take attendance at meetings–don’t! Instead have attendees take do their own check-in by adding themselves to the minutes (in a shared document).

 

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android

 

My meeting agendas are a shared document (which everyone at the meeting has access to) which morph into the minutes in real time as the meeting progresses. At the beginning of the meeting I remind everyone to register their presence and that’s it. This has the added bonus of avoiding the dreaded, gut wrenching “who just joined?” question that interrupts the beginning of most meetings and usually gets asked 20 times before the meeting starts.

Reaching Critical Mass

Once the meeting starts (and I don’t start unless I have enough people to cover some of the topics), I’m less concerned with who joins.  And since I try to keep my invite lists tight it’s easy to know whether the people I really need to start are present or not.

Starting on time–within a minute or two of the scheduled time–is critical. It can take a while for the culture of a meeting to change to starting on time, but I’ve found that over time people know the meeting is going to start on time and if they want to know everything that happened they’ll be on time.

How This Process Works

  • I use a shared document for the agenda that morphs into the meeting minutes or notes
  • At the start of a meeting I tell people to indicate their presence next to their name
  • If someone has told me before the meeting that they can’t come I put “regrets” or “PTO” or the reason they can’t attend after their name
  • For someone that doesn’t show up or doesn’t respond to the calendar invite I put nothing after their name
  • When the minutes go out that ambiguity is there for the reader to interpret
  • Someone that is invited or insisted on being invited and yet there’s never any indicator after their name raises questions over time

Be Clear on Names and Representation

  • I like to put names in alphabetical order by first name and group them by role or functional team
  • Adding the role each person plays makes it easy to spot teams that are sending too many people
  • Always use a person’s full name
  • Removes ambiguity as to who “John” is, even if there is one John
  • Helps new team members really know who people are
  • My minutes go to a central meeting minutes list where context immediately gets lost

Handling People that Come Late

  • You don’t have to say “oh, that’s okay, we were just getting started” if they just interrupted the meeting and it isn’t true
  • Thank the the person for coming and stop there
  • Re-enforce the value of being on time by refusing to go backwards in the agenda to re-hash a topic for the person who was late. Yes, there are obvious exceptions to this, but this is my general approach
  • Suggest that late comers read the minutes or get with someone who was there after the meeting to get caught up

I realize people have conflicts, get stuck in traffic, etc. Over time you’ll usually see a pattern of who genuinely had a problem that couldn’t be avoided and the person who lives in their own timezone. I get that we are all wired differently, but I don’t think it is fair for one person to force 15 other people into their timezone.

Related Episodes

Credits

All songs licensed under Creative Commons

Transcript

This transcript was created automatically and may contain small errors.

I know you’ve been there. Maybe it annoys you as much as it does me. So who just joined? Uh, yeah, who just joined the call? Um, yeah, who just joined?

Who just joined? You just— it’s like you want to poke both your eyes out. Well, in this episode, I have a solution to that. It’s really simple. You don’t do it.

You trust people to be grownups and to be fully invested in participating in the meeting, which is why we’re all there to begin with, right? So I use a shared document for my meeting agendas and for all my meeting minute capture. So at the top of the meeting agenda is a block, like a title block. Well, I don’t know if you call it title block. Anyway, it’s a list of people, and I use one line per person.

I put their full name. I recommend using first and last name, and then I put in parentheses next to their name their role. So if they are a developer, or if they are the QE manager, or if they are release engineering, I put that in parentheses. So it’s really clear who they are. There’s no ambiguity.

With first names, and then it’s really clear like which function they represent. It’s also a really good way to just kind of keep a bead on how many people are coming from each team, particularly as a meeting increases in size. It’s not uncommon in my experience to have one, there’s usually one team in particular, but one or two where the number of people attending from that team just continues to increase over time. I have a separate episode on that, see the notes for the link to that one. But again, capturing first, full name, and their role, I just find it to be a really useful tool.

One other thing to add on this, at my company we have a common mailing list. It’s one mailing list that all of the product release meetings send, they CC when they send out the minutes for their meeting, they CC this list, and that gives anyone in the company that’s interested in the meeting meetings that are going on, the opportunity to see the minutes from that meeting, which is just another really good reason to put a person’s first and last name. So there’s, you know what, usually in the context of a meeting, if you’re on that release team, you know who the other people are. But for an outsider reading the minutes, a big list of first names is going to be really not tell a whole lot. So here’s how I do this.

I start, first of all, I start every meeting on time or within a minute or 2, unless, I guess there’s some exceptions here, but generally as people are joining, they’ve kind of learned that when they attend my meeting, the first thing they do is they look at the shared document and they put the word present or here or, you know, people have fun with it, something next to their name that indicates that they were at the meeting. I’m usually watching that. I’m also— we also do video conferences with BlueJeans. It’s a pretty decent platform. I do recommend it.

Occasionally it’s a little buggy or a little laggy, but for the most part it’s rock solid. I use it multiple times a day. So as people are joining, I’m usually— I’ve got the agenda that I prepared beforehand, so I know that thing inside and out. And I kind of usually know where the hotspots in the agenda are. You know, are we going to need to be talking with, I don’t know, say someone from legal, or a developer and a QE engineer to resolve a bug that we can’t get past.

So, kind of before the meeting starts, I quickly will refresh myself with the agenda, who I need, and once I get the key people that I need, I’m ready to start the meeting. So, if the meeting is supposed to start at 11:00 and it’s 11:01, the meeting begins. Sometimes I’ll hop around the agenda. So, you know, maybe the critical person I needed for topic number 1 isn’t there. I’ll skip to topic number 2 or even the bottom.

Sometimes I’ll start at the bottom of the agenda and work backwards. So start the meeting by reminding everyone to indicate their presence in the first part of the agenda. And then I just roll from there. So this has the added benefit I just came up with this a few years ago and several, a lot of people now use this format in my workplace. I was having people that I invited.

Well, it’s always ironic, you know, the people that are insistent that they be invited and then they don’t show up. So I had some of that going on. I had people that I really needed at the meetings that weren’t showing up and it felt a little— I don’t know, heavy-handed to say absent or blew off the meeting or didn’t show up. So what I’ve— what I did is I just kind of, since it’s self-check-in, if you’re not there to check in for yourself, the space after your name is empty. And so if there are 10 people on the agenda and 8 of them have the word present after their name and for whatever reason this person doesn’t, well, I just kind of leave it as an exercise to whoever’s reading the minutes to just note that there’s nothing next to that person’s name.

Why they weren’t there, we don’t know because they didn’t even tell me. Now, if someone tells me ahead of time, hey, John, I got a conflict, or I’m out, or I’m on vacation, or whatever, I’ll just put that next to their name, you know, on PTO, regrets, can’t make it, something like that. But if nobody can, if nobody has the courtesy to tell me that they’re not coming, then I just simply leave it blank.

Related to the issue of starting on time, another thing I don’t do is I don’t go out of my way to try to make people feel less bad when they’re late. You know, there’s always that classic, hey, sorry I’m late. And maybe if it’s someone that’s like never late, I might say something like, oh, hey, no problem. But if it’s that person that’s chronically late, you know, they— They bat 50/50 when it comes to coming on time. I often will not.

Sometimes I will acknowledge them. I’ll say, hey, nice to see you. Thanks for coming. Glad you could make it. I won’t be sarcastic about it, but I don’t think it’s necessary to excuse or make people feel better when they’ve interrupted your meeting.

The meeting started at a certain time. It was on their calendar in advance. I don’t schedule last-minute meetings usually. So. You know, it’s just kind of the way it is.

So, I know some people feel like you have to say, oh, no problem, but it is a problem, particularly if they’re late, particularly if they’re 10 or 15 or 20 minutes late, and particularly with some of these situations where the person that’s late now wants to go back and either revisit a topic that’s been previously discussed, or they want to, they want an update on what was decided. And depending on the severity of the situation, the person, all that kind of stuff, I just kind of make it up on the fly. I don’t have any qualms telling that person that’s come late, sorry, Fred, we’ve already moved on. We covered that topic in depth. The, you know, the notes, the minutes kind of state, you know, the decisions that we made and the next steps.

So if you have any questions or clarification after reading that, Um, Feel free to, you know, ask me after the meeting, or, you know, bring it up at the end if we still have time. And then I just jump right into the next topic or keep going with where I was. What I’ve found over time is some people are just chronically late. I think I like to tease a few of them that they live in their own time zone. And I don’t know what it is.

I’ve Just kind of, I guess I was raised in a family that was always prompt and that was just kind of beat into me and maybe it’s part of the way I’m wired. I don’t know. So just being on time is important and I have found that meetings that have a culture of just kind of starting with whenever, always start whenever. And I would say 9 times out of 10 when my meetings start, I have a majority of the people there. There’s some people, you know, if I really, really need them, I’ll ping them on instant messenger.

We use IRC, which is Slack to the people of today that have never heard of IRC. So I’ll do that sometimes to just, you know, say, hey, did you, you know, are you able to join us today and take it from there? Again, I think it’s really important to just set that tone, be on time yourself. I usually get to a meeting, I try to get signed in 3 or 4 minutes before the meeting starts, everything’s ready to go, avoid the, I don’t know, the audio, the browser glitches or restarts or whatever you have to do to get things working so that, again, when people join, they know that, hey, it’s John’s meeting, he starts on time. I just find that Things go better that way.

One last thing. I’m expanding my coaching practice and taking new clients. So if you or someone you know is looking for a way to move past the things that are holding them back to reach the things that they really want, I’d love to help. And even if you’re not sure what those things are, all the more reason coaching might be a great option for you. There’s nothing to lose here and everything to gain.