How to Conquer Ghost and Zombie Meetings®

Learn what Ghost and Zombie Meetings® are and how our Check-in and Zombie Hunter features work with sensor integrations and Eventboard to eliminate them.

With Halloween and the spirit of haunted houses upon us, we thought we’d take this time to talk about Ghost and Zombie Meetings® in the workplace and how you can conquer them. Just mentioning unattended meetings raises the hair on our necks. If you aren’t getting shivers down your spine, you probably don’t know what Ghost and Zombie Meetings® are. Let’s get that out of the way:

Ghost Meeting:

A single scheduled meeting that goes unattended.

Zombie Meeting®:

A scheduled recurring meeting that goes on unattended indefinitely.

The names fit. Ghost meetings haunt the workplace by wasting space and time and then disappear without a trace. Zombie Meetings® stick around far beyond their expiration date and feed on your company’s valuable resources.

You may think a missed meeting or two on the schedule isn’t that scary. We say, think again. “A booked, but empty, conference room may seem like no big deal, but it can have a big impact on the overall operations of a successful company,” explains Shaun Ritchie, CEO of Teem, in an article for Venture Beat. “Since most employees are conditioned to move on when seeing a blocked out conference room on a shared calendar, detection [of Zombie Meetings®] can often take weeks, if not months.”

The average percentage of no-show meetings is 36%. Once unattended meetings get out of control, you’re up against a hoard of resource-eating monsters. And what’s so scary about this is that your company may be victim to Zombie Meetings® without even knowing it!

With these meetings haunting your workplace, it can seem like there’s not enough space and resources for employees even though there actually are. We call this Perceived Utilization. If there appears to be no space available for an important meeting, a private phone call, or a collaboration to push a project further into development, productivity is stalled and reserved space and time are wasted.

Okay, so there are Zombies in the building. Now what?

Stay calm and turn them on. We’re here for you and the happiness and productivity of your employees. We also have two features specifically made to free up rooms from the teeth of thoughtless Zombies.

The first step is to turn on our Check-in feature which works with our sensor integrations or Eventboard room displays. (With sensors, checking in is done automatically, with Eventboard, checking in is done manually.)

If no one checks into a scheduled meeting after a set amount of time, Teem identifies the meeting as a Ghost Meeting and cancels it. Our platform then frees up that space and time so that others can use it so that it doesn’t go to waste. When someone uses a room that would have been wasted on an unattended meeting, it’s called Recapturing a room, and it’s awesome.

Next, Zombie Meeting® victims, meet our Zombie Hunter feature. After turning on Check-in via sensors or EventBoard, your Teem admins will choose how many times a recurring meeting can be missed before the entire no-show series is automatically canceled forever by Zombie Hunter This feature saves your company time, space, and resources that would have been used for reserved, but empty spaces and trying to manage shared calendars. How terrifyingly wasteful and boring!

So the next time you see a reserved room left empty, you’ll know that your company is being haunted, but have no fear! Tell yourself, “I know what to do!” Then jump onto our admin page and turn on Check-in and Zombie Hunter. Trick or Treat, Zombie Hunter, Trick or Treat.