How many meetings do you attend where you want to glue your eyes open so that you don’t fall asleep? Lots I reckon?I was once in a conference where the speaker was so boring that one of my colleagues not only fell asleep but fell off his chair into the aisle with a loud bang. Good job – the noise woke me up as well.
Move forward to a world filled with online meetings and the problem remains, the only difference being the video off and/or the mute button, which saves you from falling too hard off your ergonomically designed wheelie chair.
The trouble is that the poor people that induce these comas might not realise just how boring they are, and let’s face it you don’t want to be the person to tell him (it’s mostly a ‘him’ right?).
So can technology help?
Yes!
Phew.
How?
It’s not terribly helpful to wait until the meeting is finished. Even if a survey has been sent out to all that attended so they can tell him that he was boring, the damage is done. Worse, the ‘well I’m not telling him’ problem still stands – made harder if they are a senior person in your company (and they often are right?). So what you probably need is some kind of real time measure that will help him out, right?
That’s exactly what we thought. Meeting Canary is all about looking for signals not carrying out surveillance, so next time you join a teams meeting, our feathered friend joins the call and provides all sorts of useful signals – which can be seen by all participants – OR those signals can be sent direct to individuals who are speaking.
Using advanced AI algorithms Meeting Canary provides immediate feedback on things like meeting ‘energy’, meeting ‘focus’, whether people are being included in the meeting, and whether the meeting is respectful.
Additional visual cues – like a network diagram – show who is speaking the most, and who are they speaking too is also presented, so our boring friend can see if he’s been banging on for too long and see who he is ignoring!!
We can also send a prompt directly to the yawn worthy presenter to suggest that they might stop being so dull (but not using that language of course, we’re much kinder than that).
This way no one needs to tell him, the data will do that for you, and we can stop glueing our eyelids and have better, quicker and fewer tedious meetings.