Lucid Meetings Blog

Too much time wasted in unproductive meetings.  Ineffective meetings plague companies around the globe, making this a top complaint for employees at every level.

Conservation Colorado engaged Lucid Meetings to help them improve their meeting performance, which had been consistently rated the number one problem in their annual employee feedback surveys.

I spoke with Nikki Riedt, Conservation Colorado's Operation and Finance Director, at the end of our engagement together about their experience. I'm delighted to be able to share that feedback with you here.

Background

Conservation Colorado is an organization working to protect Colorado’s climate, air, land, water, and communities through organizing, advocacy, and elections.

The level of urgency and scrutiny surrounding climate change has skyrocketed. In response to this rapidly changing landscape, Conservation Colorado's changed too. By the time they contacted Lucid, the executive team featured many leaders who were new to the organization within the past year, and the total number of employees was growing rapidly.

What wasn't changing? The way they all felt about their meetings.

It doesn't matter what kind of team you work on or what you're trying to do - if you can't get that team to all agree and do their part, you fail.

Teamwork is the practice of agreeing on a shared goal and then dividing the work required to achieve that goal amongst the team members. To get that agreement and coordinate all that doing, you've got to communicate.

We're coming up on our 10th anniversary here at Lucid, and over all those years, we've done our fair share of failing. One of our more painful failures came about through a failure to effectively communicate.

About iWMS

iWMS is an international HighJump software service provider.

Since its inception in South Africa 2009, the company has extended its operations into India, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

This global expansion allows iWMS to access the best global resources while also expanding their market share. The combination allows them to blend teams and make sure the right level of experience is available for their customers.

iWMS CEO, Richard Evans, noticed that his internal and customer meetings were going well, but he thought they could use a bit more structure.

He decided to look for a way to improve the company’s management meetings, and decided that it was important to document decisions, formally track action items, and follow up after meetings to make sure everyone was sticking to commitments.

Miawpukek Mi’kamawey Mawi’omi is a First Nation Reserve located at the mouth of the Conne River on the south coast of the island of Newfoundland.

Over the years the community has seen a steady growth in government, social reforms, health, education, economic development, culture and traditions.

As Systems Analyst and coordinator of a number of regular meetings, René Jeddore recognized a need to build more efficiency into their everyday operations in order to maintain the Council's progress.

The Council's reliance on paper processes led René to search for a new solution that included a way to digitize the Council's records. 

Lisette Sutherland runs Collaboration Superpowers, a workshop facilitation business, from her remote office in the Netherlands.

Professional facilitators from all over the world license her materials to teach her Work Together Anywhere Workshop, both online and in person.

When preparing for the workshop, Lisette spends a few hours setting up each section by creating an agenda, uploading documents, and setting up multiple software platforms for her participants.

However, because she uses Lucid for the online meeting segment, she’s able to leverage a pre-defined meeting template, automating both setup and follow through—saving her a minimum of thirty minutes in preparation time.

Meeting agenda templates also allow new facilitators to get up and running quickly, making her licensing business more scalable.

Over the course of a year, this huge time savings allows her to focus on improving the workshop curriculum and managing high-level business activities.

Return Consulting has worked for many years with clients from startups to the Fortune 50. Over that time, they’ve found that the most uniform shortcoming across all organizations is the weak commitments made in poorly run meetings, working toward ill-defined project objectives.

Toby Lucich, Return’s Founder and CEO, saw an opportunity to solve this problem for his clients, and was inspired to create Return Leverage - a service that enables leaders and project specialists to redefine their workload by delegating the day-to-day details of project management, meeting facilitation and task organization.

Using Lucid, Toby and his expert team drive these often overlooked essential habits within client organizations in a very effective way.

We spoke with Toby Lucich for this case study, and here’s what he had to say.

The Problem - And Inspiration for a New Service

Many of the clients Return worked with suffered from poorly run meetings, but this hasn’t been due to a lack of knowledge, or inadequate training.

Instead, Return found that clients wanted to rush through meetings, trying to keep their scarce employee resources focused on the most critical work at hand - the specific tasks that make the ’highest and best use’ of their available expertise.

"The problem is that when organizations try to shortcut their meetings, they lose the fundamental cadence that confirms commitments and drives accountability,” Lucich shared. “This ‘hurry up offense’ left no one doing the basic blocking and tackling work anymore – such as conducting effective meetings, monitoring commitments and deliverables, and keeping track of all the little details.”

The Intel Alumni Network Board is a twelve person, nonprofit Board of Directors serving approximately 5000 former Intel employees.

The Intel Alumni Network’s mission is to create a thriving community that encourages personal and professional growth through networking and thought leadership.

The Board of Directors meets regularly to decide on the strategic direction of the network, and executing on their initiatives requires attention to detail as well as documentation of progress and decisions.

Challenges Facing Boards of Directors

One challenge that all Boards of Directors face is maintaining continuity between meetings. Because the meetings are held monthly or quarterly, remembering what was discussed from one to the next can prove difficult.

In addition, board members are usually employed at different companies, and sometimes they want to use the meeting tools they already have. If there is no centralization of information, important decisions can get lost in the shuffle.

"Since we don’t have to switch around between different sharing tools and conference lines from meeting to meeting or from one agenda item to the next, each director always knows how to get online for our meetings and we don’t have delays while we wait for people to get onto the right tool." Pat Scatena, Corporate Secretary

Another challenge for boards is keeping focused. Since Board members manage their own committees and are responsible for strategic objectives outside of the Board, they sometimes want to tackle the details of other projects - like running an event or gathering input on a website design - instead of sticking to the topics on the agenda.

Directors sometimes need to coordinate their own committee meetings in addition to the main board meetings. If they aren’t able to easily set up and run them successfully, they might resort to using multiple tools and losing valuable information.

How Lucid Supports Boards

Cloud Four is a small web design and development company based in Portland, Oregon. Passionate about the mobile web, the team’s expertise lies in building websites and apps that work seamlessly across any device.

As Senior Project Manager, Megan Notarte is responsible for making sure that technical requirements are communicated clearly between her team and their clients. Since Cloud Four often engages in highly complex technical projects, this can present a challenge.

Megan and the rest of the team use Lucid Meetings to collaborate on notes during client meetings, coordinate action items to keep everyone focused on their share of the workload, and share notes once the meetings end.

"Prior to using Lucid Meetings, we had no solid conference call and screen sharing solution. We had hobbled together various tools (free conference calling and various screen sharing services), but it was far from seamless. We also had no good way of collaborating on an agenda or sharing meeting notes and action items."

The Devil is in the Details

Project managers in any industry must be highly detail oriented and able to keep an entire team focused in order to lead everyone to a successful project completion.

Scope and requirements can change at any time, so it is imperative that the project leader record decisions as accurately as possible along the way.

In order to be successful, Megan relies on the following Lucid Meetings' features to flawlessly take her projects from idea to final launch:

Lunette is a small but fast growing global company, headquartered in the rural community of Juupajoki, Finland.

For Marketing & Social Media Manager Cathy Chapman, keeping up with all of the marketing activities is a daily challenge. As she moves from project to project, she needs to keep her team organized by managing tasks, decisions, and timelines to keep work on track. 

Cathy and her team use the Lucid Meetings’ agenda to contribute ideas for upcoming meetings, action items to keep everyone on task, and the meeting scheduler to initiate a meeting with potential clients in a professional way.

Challenges small global companies all face

Working via the web, small companies have access to a global audience and can easily hire team members all over the world - yet managing to keep everyone in sync at all times can be tricky. With the right tools and processes, small teams can overcome just about any remote work task.

1) Moving work forward

Cathy’s team is based in multiple locations - from the main headquarters in Finland to team members in Utah, Montana, and Tennessee. She and her teammates don’t see each other every day, so one of their biggest struggles was getting everyone up to speed before a weekly meeting.

In order to not forget what they wanted to discuss in each meeting, they started using Lucid's collaborative agenda editor to jot down ideas as they thought of them throughout the week. Now, the team comes to meetings prepared because they’ve been able to contribute directly to the conversation ahead of time.

The Open Supporter Data Interface (OSDI) seeks to define a common application programming interface (API) for moving data between different systems in the progressive left cause-based, campaign and non-profit marketplace.

The OSDI chairman, Josh Cohen, was looking for a way to keep meetings organized, private, and efficient. After using Lucid Meetings, the group was able to keep meetings running smoothly, know who was participating at all times, and easily change presenters or share their screen when needed.

Challenges Facing OSDI - and Committees in General

Committees can have their own unique requirements - especially when it comes to meetings. Members need to share documents, capture notes and decisions, track attendance and often vote on outcomes.

The size of a committee can sometimes be large, which can make for a cumbersome and lengthy discussion.

OSDI used to hold committee meetings where participants were eager to give input, yet didn’t exactly know when it was their turn to do so.

This sometimes led to inefficiencies and frustration, where committee members were either being talked over by one another or not being heard at all.

Josh attended a committee meeting for a different organization that used Lucid, and noticed the speakers were taking turns and speaking in an orderly fashion. This encouraged him to learn more about the Lucid Meetings platform.

OSDI was using join.me for all their meetings, but there was no way to tell who was joining a meeting. It wasn’t possible to determine who was dialed into the telephone conference and identities in the web screen share side weren’t authenticated.

Due to the private and political nature of their meetings, not knowing who may have acquired the dial in information to a meeting can lead to security concerns.

Lastly, making sure that all welcome attendees can access a meeting is a challenge for any facilitator - even when you’ve done your best to make sure attendees have all of the information.

How OSDI Uses Lucid To Support Committee Meetings

OSDI started using Lucid to make sure their committee meetings were organized and participants each had a chance to contribute.