Conversations

I don’t know about you, but turning on the Conversations feature in Outlook can get me in trouble, if not just really embarrassed.

After I updated a meeting invite today with last week’s agenda and materials (aack!), I knew I had to disable that Conversations feature.

I was glad when Conversations came about. It let me see the subject email thread all in one place. No having to search or filter by someone’s name . . . the thread showed all the messages on that subject. In one place. Loved that!

But . . . it’s easy to not pay too close attention to the date of the conversations. Like today: Someone forwarded today’s meeting invite this morning, so that notice popped up in my Outlook. Right above that, however, was a message asking if I’d attach the meeting materials to today’s calendar invite (the request was in the same thread because I enabled Conversations). Except: That message right above there wasn’t new, today. It was from Jan. 20. I didn’t pay attention to the date of that message . . . all I saw was the request to attach the meeting materials to “today’s” meeting.

Which I did. Which was the wrong thing to do. Because, today is Jan. 27 and the materials in that message were for the Jan. 20 meeting – oof!

So, after I fixed the correction, I turned off Conversations.

Let’s see how long it takes me until I go back to using the Conversations feature (because I really do like that feature overall).

If you don’t like the Conversations feature for your inbox, it’s easy to deactivate.

Open View. Uncheck Show as Conversations. Then click This folder.

And another: More on meetings

I spent a Sunday taking a few on-line courses that are available to my firm’s employees 24/7 (I love that option; I can grow my knowledge and skills whenever I want—in my jammies or with beverage in hand, pausing if I need a break—you get the picture).

So anyway, one of the courses I finished was talking about the sins of meetings (did you know there are seven of them, and that they are deadly?)

The webinar guy talked about people who show up late for meetings. That’s just downright annoying, if you ask me. If I’m the leader of the meeting, I must confess I still don’t have a set way of addressing the tardy person, if that person should even be addressed/acknowledged when they walk in late to the meeting.

I remember attending an educational session in which the speaker said she wouldn’t acknowledge the tardy person; wouldn’t allow them to break into (upset the rhythm of) her presentation.

I recall being at another session and someone walked in late. The speaker backtracked to bring the tardy person up to speed on what they missed. (So those of us that arrived on time, we had to sit through a repeat.)

The webinar guy talked about how meetings cost your company money (he had an example formula, something like: 8 people x $50/hour x a 3-hour meeting = $1,200). And he said that tardy attendees should not be allowed to continue to be tardy. And he gave some examples of what some firms (or meeting leaders) do to try to curb the tardiness, such as: If there are 8 people in the meeting, buy only 7 doughnuts or coffees. Or, the person late to the meeting buys dinner for everyone.

Those tactics might work, but do you think the person who is habitually tardy gives a hoot if they never get a doughnut? I think not.

The webinar guy offered this solution: When that annoying person shows up late, tell him/her (something like) this, “Your being late is a waste of my time and a waste of everyone’s time in this room. You just cost this organization [insert dollar figure here] because of your tardiness. Your tardiness is not going to be allowed to continue.”

And then don’t invite that person to future meetings.

The webinar guy suggested you bluntly, calmly, and rationally tell the tardy person the results of his/her tardiness.

I kind of like that tactic. It’s bold, and sometimes you should be bold. Right?

What I’m not sure of right now is whether I’d say that in front of everyone (right when the tardy person walked in), or whether I’d wait to speak to the tardy person privately. I do know that if I did it privately, I’d be sure to let the other meeting attendees know the reason why the tardy person is no longer invited to our meetings. (If I was bold enough to dis-invite that tardy person from future meetings. Not sure I can be that bold.)

How do you handle tardy meeting attendees (or what ways have you seen others handle that situation)?

Skype

Before Covid-19, we’d have in-person monthly Safety Meetings at work, with just a few people joining via conference call. This month, we offered Skype with call-in lines so team members didn’t have to show up at the office (if everyone attended, it would have been a little over 200 team members). Did it work smoothly?

Nope, not as smoothly as it could have worked, with respect to technical difficulties.

Why? Well, some of it was lack of communication on who was supposed to do what, but that’s another story that doesn’t need to be shared here. We heard that some people couldn’t hear the speaker. One of our savvy admins then logged into a laptop and used that as the speaker. Turns out the desktop we were presenting from didn’t have microphone capability. Plus, I think some of those on the receiving end didn’t have audio capability, until they also dialed in to the conference line.

I sat down with a couple of the other admins afterward and came up with a list of Lessons Learned. One of the lessons dealt with the set up and logging in to Skype (admins were responsible for dialing into the conference line, plus logging in to Skype and getting things ready on the big screen).

I don’t think the person that logged in to Skype enabled the settings beforehand. I heard a comment from someone who joined via Skype afterward that everyone was shown as a Presenter.

And at the beginning of the log-in, the admin looked at her calendar and dialed the conference line number showing there. I’m asking people on the conference line to speak up and tell me if they could hear me. No responses. No responses after a few times of asking for a sound check. Someone questioned whether the right conference line was used. I hung up and dialed the number, and bingo! People were waiting on the line for the speaker to start. We find out later that the admin who first dialed in, her calendar hadn’t been updated when the new conference line number was added to the meeting invite. What the heck, Outlook? 

Overall, our first Skype/conference call Safety Meeting wasn’t a total loss. We got through the slide deck as expected. And we’ll be sure to use the Lessons Learned before our meeting in April.

The teacher in me came out afterward: I whipped up a little Skype cheat sheet and shared it with the admins.