The Menti Listen Show: Bi-weekly Wednesday Meetings at Mentimeter
What if company meetings were less like meetings and more like a talk show? Here at Mentimeter we host a whole company meeting every other Wednesday to make sure everyone across the organization is on the same page. We transform what could have been a boring company procedure into an engaging and entertaining talk show. And, in typical Menti style, we shift the focus from talking to listening.
General or whole company meetings are pretty common. Depending on the size of the organization they might be annual, quarterly, monthly, or weekly. Here at Mentimeter, we host whole company meetings every other Wednesday. But this is not really a meeting at all.
“It’s not a meeting” says Oscar Svernlöv, Production lead of the Menti Listen Show. “What we try to create is an infotainment event.” We want to communicate important and interesting information to the whole of the organization...but we also want to have fun while we do it.
Luckily we get a helping hand from our own product (the bi-weekly Wednesday meeting also provides a perfect environment for testing out new features in the product before they are released! Which is always exciting for us in the audience!). The inclusive hosting skills of the hosts combined with the best, kindest, most respectful and understanding audience you could find makes this time we spend all together much more than your average meeting.
The Power of Together
Our Menti Listen Show is about so much more than just sharing information. It’s about sharing an experience. We are a group of people who believe in the power of all being together in a room in forming a strong collective. We believe that work is a place for play as well as a place for work. Being all together is also important to us because we believe in shifting focus away from the speaker and onto the audience. It’s woven into the fabric of our product as well as the company culture we’ve built here.
Your role as an audience member is just as important as the role of the speaker, so being all together in the meeting is important to make that dynamic work. While we stress the importance of fun and entertainment in these meetings, that doesn’t mean they’re a frivolous waste of time. While so many other companies might treat a general meeting more seriously, often your role as an audience member is relegated to the status of a passive listener, rather than an active contributor. Here at Mentimeter everyone is involved in the meeting and can have their voice heard - either by presenting, or using Menti - which makes the whole meeting so much more effective and time efficient.
Striking a balance
Much of the work that Oscar does involves trying to strike the right balance between a number of factors.
The Menti Listen Show is a place for announcements, but we think it’s important to cover the big and the small. Maybe we’re announcing that we’re opening an office in North America, or that people can sign up for a workshop that is taking place next week. We also want to hear from everyone across the organization. So that means making sure newer people get space to talk as well as people who have been here for a while. We want to hear from an intern just as much as we want to hear from the CEO. And of course we make a conscious effort to have speakers in the meeting that are as diverse as possible.
Striking a balance between fun icebreakers or quizzes, and important business information that can help us sync across the organization is always at the front of Oscar’s mind. Obviously including that business information is important for working smart and making sure this time we spend together every week is well spent. But we are also a company that believes in the importance of that lighter, fun, and entertaining content. Because it brings us all together. So much of the meeting is about sharing an experience, as well as information, and becoming closer as a group week by week.
Listening and being heard
One of the things we do in these meetings is to engage the audience as much as we can. And we try to do this in a variety of ways. In the same meeting, we might do a poll to find out everyone’s favorite fika treat (and a lively debate might emerge in the comments from audience!) or ask the important question of why we like working here. (The most common answer to that last one was the people and the culture, by the way).
In the product you can moderate the questions that are submitted to the Q&A, but it is a Mentimeter meeting principle of fielding questions unmoderated. We believe in trusting each other with the responsibility of being relevant and respectful, and we believe in having no barriers to entry for asking any question. And we always address everything.
