**Meeting guidelines are part of the Enterprise plan**
Apply meeting best practices across the organization with integrated guiding prompts in every Google Calendar event so every meeting is a valuable one. Keep reading or check out this video walk through!
What are meeting guidelines?
Meeting guidelines are a series of guiding prompts that appear when booking a new meeting in Google Calendar. They are part of Fellow's Chrome browser extension and are based on configurable workspace settings.
These prompts are designed to guide your team to apply research-backed best practices to enable thoughtful meeting creation, boost meeting engagement and make room for deep work and execution.
Are meeting guidelines customizable?
Each workspace can decide which meeting guidelines they would like to turn on, which could be all 8 or just a few. These can be configured in Workspace settings --> Meeting guidelines. Note: you must be an administrator on your workspace to make any changes.
Where do I see meeting guidelines?
The meeting guidelines are a feature of the Fellow browser extension! In order to see meeting guidelines, an individual will need to have the browser extension installed.
If you would like everyone in your organization to see these meeting guidelines, we recommend following these instructions.
Types of meeting guidelines
These are the best practices that make up Fellow's meeting guidelines:
Meeting cost in hours (or dollars)
Meetings are an investment in employee time which means that meetings should be carefully considered and effectively managed. When the meeting cost guideline is configured, the total cost of the meeting in attendee hours is shown within the event description when creating, editing, and viewing the event.
For this calculation, we include required attendees if they have accepted the invite or haven't yet responded (we excluded attendees who declined the meeting)
Meeting purpose
A meeting purpose sets clear expectations for attendees for why the meeting is happening, helps ensure focus before and during the meeting.
If a meeting organizer is creating a meeting, the meeting guideline tool tip will remind them to add a meeting purpose to the description on the meeting. After the meeting, the organizer can then evaluate whether the meeting purpose they had defined was met.
Meeting attendees
Studies have shown that more than 7 attendees reduces decision making abilities in the meeting. If a meeting organizer is creating a meeting with 8 or more attendees, a tool tip will appear reminding them to remove additional attendees or mark them as optional.
Finite recurring meetings
When a meeting organizer is creating a recurring meeting with no end date, remind them to add an end date. An end date for recurring meetings allows for purpose reassessment and modifications as needed, preventing disengagement caused by routine.
No-meeting day
Give employees a dedicated day to do focus work uninterrupted by designating one day a week as a no-meeting day for your workspace.
If a user tries to schedule a meeting on this designated no-meeting day, they will be prompted to find a different day for the meeting and leave the no-meeting day intact!
Speedy meetings
Prevent meeting fatigue and a build up of stress by giving employees short breaks between their meetings to reset. When a meeting organizer is creating a meeting, the meeting guideline tooltip will remind them to shorten the meeting to give participants a break.
With this guideline configured, 1 hour events will be shorted by 10 minutes and 30 minute events will be shortened by 5 mins. Depending on your organizations preferences, you can choose this break to be at the start of the meeting by starting late (ex. 11:10 instead of 11), or by ending early (ex. 10:25 instead of 10:30)
Attendee weekly meeting hours
For individuals that are highly booked and who spend 20+ hours a week in meetings, it's important to limit them being invited to meetings where they are not essential.
When a meeting organizer is booking a meeting with an attendee who already has 20+ hours of meetings that week, the organizer will see a prompt to consider whether this person is essential to the meeting that they are scheduling or whether they can be updated after the fact
Short notice booking
Meeting scheduled on short notice prevent participants from being prepared which is essential to making the meeting effective. When a meeting organizer is creating a meeting scheduled to be within the next four hours, the organizer will be reminded to give the attendees more notice and schedule the meeting for a different day.
Final warning when saving
Show the organizer a final warning when creating an event that does not meet one or more meeting guidelines. (Optional) Include a link to internal Meeting Guidelines documentation in the message. It's common for organizations to have an internal meeting policy to keep communication and expectations consistent across teams. With Fellow's Meeting Guidelines, you have the option to provide a link back to your internal policy when events are being created that don't meet that criteria.
To enable this, an administrator can head to Workspace settings > Meeting guidelines to configure the correct URL as pictured below:
No agenda reminders
The no-agenda reminder guideline can be used for enhancing your meeting agendas.
Utilizing the no agenda reminder ensures that you and your team receives timely notifications through both email and push notifications to add to the Fellow note. These reminders are sent to all meeting attendees who have not declined the meeting and have been configured in your workspace along with users who have access to the note via cross workspace collaboration.