How I Work: David, IT Administrator at ThoughtSpot
David Sopkin, IT Administrator at ThoughtSpot, chats with us about why engineers like to walk in the park, forest-themed conference rooms and the reasons not to hold a meeting during lunch — all in the next of our ‘How I Work’ article series.
What is the number one advice you could give us when it comes to organizing effective meetings?
Make your meetings efficient. Have a clear goal or purpose in mind, leave nothing undone, and be sure to have action steps you can take after the meeting.
What is the coolest meeting room you have at ThoughtSpot?
The coolest meeting room is nature. Walking around outside is a favourite at ThoughtSpot, and we have many engineers who like to take walks to talk out solutions. Our office park is a few acres so there’s a lot of space to walk around — and it also helps that you don’t have to schedule a walk.
What is the best advice you’ve ever received on organizing meetings?
The best advice would be reducing laptop use. This is true especially for quick sync meetings. No laptops keep everybody focused and seem to almost motivate people to keep the meeting short. Also, don’t have meetings during lunch! It’s a time to relax for a bit; if you have to talk about work, at least make sure it’s in a casual manner.
What is the craziest meeting you’ve ever attended at ThoughtSpot?
The craziest meetings that we have are the ones that cram all our engineers in one conference room — nobody likes that very much though.
Where do you prefer to hold your meetings at ThoughtSpot?
It depends on who I’m meeting with. I prefer to hold formal meetings in conference rooms, and informal or impromptu meetings standing up. Having a meeting in a conference room cuts out distractions and makes meetings more efficient.
How do you go about naming the meeting rooms in your company and why?
We named half our conference rooms after world cities, Paris, Zurich, Barcelona, London, and half for US landmarks, Hawaii, the Hamptons, Napa, and Yosemite. We had a contest with a “vacation spots” theme, and the winners were where people from our company would vacation if they had the choice.
If you were to design and name any meeting or conference room, how would it look like and what would you name it?
I would love to have forest-themed conference rooms. Real floor plants, lots of natural light, and a live-edge conference table. I would name them after different tree species.
If you were to hire an office assistant, what should their personality traits be?
An office assistant has to be completely flexible, and very comfortable with setting precedent and creating workflows. An office assistant, especially at a young company, has the potential to make a significant impact on the day-to-day operations of a company, so it should be someone that is excellent at what they do. Our office manager, Monique, is a fantastic example of what we look for in an office manager.
How has Joan changed your meetings?
Joan has changed our meetings by really holding people to the meeting times they scheduled. Sometimes meetings can go on for minutes after they’re supposed to end, and Joan helps keep them on schedule. It has also cut down on the number of ‘surprise’ (read: unscheduled) meetings, which can block other people from meeting.
About ThoughtSpot
ThoughtSpot is disrupting the BI industry with search-driven analytics for enterprise. The company has built the world’s most advanced, yet easy-to-use number-crunching machine with a singular mission — to deliver access to data at a ‘human scale.’ The company’s founding team has previously built market-defining search and analytics technologies at Google, Amazon, Oracle and Microsoft.
Joan Meeting Room Assistant
ThoughtSpot has eight meeting rooms, all managed by Google Apps paired with Joan Meeting Room Assistant. Joan is hosted in the cloud with future plans to move to on-premises hosting.
Originally published at getjoan.com on May 26, 2016.
