Get Rid of Your Workplace Zombies With Teem

Your office is haunted and you didn’t even know it. Ghost and Zombie Meetings® are wreaking havoc on your workplace productivity. Although our room display check-in feature has been helping our customers get rid of ghost meetings (individual no-show meeting reservations) for years, until now there’s been no way to tackle Zombie Meetings®.

Teem has now released an automated feature that proactively kills your Zombie Meetings®.

What’s a Zombie Meeting®?

A Zombie Meeting® is a recurring meeting that’s on the calendar, but is no longer needed and so the attendees no longer attend. Think of a weekly 1:1 between two employees who no longer work at your company. Just like real zombies (that’s right, they’re real), zombie meetings continue to consume valuable resources long after they were supposed to be dead. The recurring meeting remains booked on a room schedule (sometimes multiple rooms) for as long as the recurring series was set up to last – which could be years from now.

How Do Zombie Meetings® Impact My Workplace?

Zombie Meetings® may seem trivial, but the subsequent ripple effect can cause a lot of waste within the workplace. Here are a few ways these meetings impact the modern workplace:

1. Zombie Meetings® prevent employees from reserving the space they need, at the ideal time. Being unable to book the right space for a meeting can be extremely frustrating for employees.
2. Zombie Meetings® skew reporting and cause businesses to plan for more space than they need.
3. Finally, these meetings often delay actual collaboration and productivity. When a room isn’t available, employees often postpone meetings until they can find an appropriate room.

How Does the Zombie Hunter Feature Work?

Teem actively monitors your company’s recurring meetings for which attendees are failing to check in on the EventBoard room display. Once a recurring meeting has failed to check in for a specified number of consecutive occurrences, Teem removes the room from the recurring meeting series, and thereby frees up that resource for the rest of the organization.

Your Teem admin chooses the desired tolerance for consecutive failed check-in occurrences, by setting that in the EventBoard configurations of the management dashboard. You can also decide to set this for specific locations only, by overriding your default EventBoard settings for a specific room or building.

If your tolerance threshold is set to the minimum value of 3, then after 2 consecutive failed check-in occurrences, Teem will send an email to the meeting organizer explaining that they will lose their room reservation if they fail to check in to the next occurrence in that meeting series.

If they do not check in to the next meeting in that series, Teem removes the room and notifies the meeting organizer via email.

We’ve also created zombie action logs so your Teem admin can track which Zombie Meetings® have received warnings, and which have been killed and had the room removed from the meeting invite. These logs can be found on your Insights platform, under the Facilities topic.