Synopsis

Jeremy Walsh joins Dr. Misner to explain the recent change in BNI’s attendance policy. In the past, the six month period for counting absences started when a new leadership team took office. This meant a member could have more than three absences in a given six-month period.

The new policy changes the requirement to say that a member is allowed three absences within a rolling six-month period. A study of all BNI chapters showed that groups that had already been using a rolling six-month period for determining absences had 50% less absenteeism than those who determined absenteeism based on when a new leadership team takes office.

For the leadership team: after you’ve taken attendance, go to the absence report in BNI Connect and enter the absences. Check to see whether you need to send an accountability letter to any members. The report has already been updated to use a rolling six-month period.

Individual members can also pull up the absence report in BNI Connect in order to see how many absences they have.

Feel free to contact Jeremy Walsh at [email protected] if you have any questions.

Brought to you by Networking Now.

Complete Transcription of Episode 482 –

Priscilla:

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Official BNI Podcast, brought to you by NetworkingNow.com, which is the leading site on the net for networking downloadables. I am Priscilla Rice, and I am coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkeley, California. I am joined on the phone today by the Founder and the Chief Visionary Officer of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner. Hello, Ivan. How are you and where are you?

Ivan:

Hi Priscilla. Good talking to you. Jeremy and I – my guest who I will be introducing in a moment- are at the global convention, the BNI Global Convention, which is open, by the way, for members all over the world, so come next year in November – or October – take a look at BNI.com or our Facebook page and we would love to have you join us here at the convention. We have about 1000 members here every year and it is open around the world.

Todays’s topic is about attendance. This is a very specific topic. You know, most of our topics, I like to keep evergreen. But this one is kind of timely. It is time based. But it could be valuable down the road for people to understand why we have the attendance policy that we have.

There is a change to the policy in the policy and guidelines sheet. For many, many, many years, we had attendance based on a term, a leadership team term. So as leadership teams transition every six months, they wipe the slates clean. The Board of Advisors, the International Board of Advisors, just voted to change that method. This is being rolled out all across the world to a rolling six months. So it is the past six months.

We have with us Jeremy Walsh. I am going to introduce Jeremy in just one second, but before I do, remember that all policies in BNI are created by the Board of Advisors. The International Board of Advisors is made up of BNI members from all around the world. It is the members who help guide this. We talked about with the members through the Board that there was a really significant difference between attendance where wiped the slate clean every six months versus a rolling six months. We are going to share that number with you after we talk to Jeremy here a little bit.

Jeremy Walsh is Customer Support? What is the exact title, Jeremy, in BNI?

Jeremy:

I am the Director of Support, Training, and Documentation for BNI Connect.

Ivan:

Jeremy has been on my podcast in the past. But Jeremy is one of the few technical support teams that actually gets huge, huge positive customer service reports. I am always so impressed with the customer service reports that we get from Jeremy’s teams.