declining a meeting invitation

The most important thing when declining a meeting invitation is to monitor the tone of your message and adjust it if necessary. Since written communication lacks nonverbal cues, declining an interview via email, text or messaging app requires a delicate approach. Always aim to be:

Clear: Make sure you say it is definite that you won't attend.

Direct: State why you won't make it.

Polite: Take the time to craft a complete reply. Instead of simply clicking “decline,” including an explanation can better help the meeting organizer understand your decision.

Indeed Editorial Team

How To Decline a Meeting (With Examples). Indeed.com February 22, 2021.

regularly scheduled meetings

Regularly scheduled meetings (staff meetings, progress report meetings, and sales meetings) sometimes seem to be called out of habit or sense of duty rather than need. They’re valuable not only for the information they allow people to share but also for the face time they offer. However, their importance doesn’t necessarily make them interesting. Meeting with the same people in the same room every week to discuss the same topics can get boring, resulting in many empty chairs – and a lack of enthusiasm among the remaining attendees. Here are some ways to keep your regular meetings fresh – and attendance high.

• Regularly review the meeting’s purpose
• Solicit agenda items from the group in advance
• Cancel when there is no reason to meet
• Rotate leadership of the meeting

Martha Craumer

“Give Your Standing Meetings a Makeover,” adapted from the “The Effective Meeting: A Checklist for Success,” Harvard Management Communication Letter. March 2001. As quoted in HBR Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter. Harvard Business Review Press. 2016.

video fatigue

 “Video fatigue” comes from many factors, such as the difficulty of making real eye contact with meeting participants (known as “gaze awareness”). Research by Microsoft shows that concentration begins to fray about 30-40 minutes into a meeting, and that stress begins to increase after about two hours of videoconferencing. 

Scott D. Anthony, Paul Cobban, Natalie Painchaud, and Andy Parker

“3 Steps to Better Virtual Meetings,” Harvard Business Review. February 19, 2021

our collective addiction to meetings

Attending too many [meetings] can be  highly stressful and tiring, and both productivity and quality take a hit when employees tune out, become demotivated, and lose valuable heads-down work time. As such, it’s hardly a surprise that managers in one survey reported 83% of the meetings on their calendars were unproductive, or that US-based professionals rated meetings as the “number one office productivity killer.”

But despite what seems to be an overwhelming consensus, endless check-ins, debriefs, all-staffs, and Zoom calls continue to plague the corporate world. What will it take for us to break free from our collective addiction to meetings?

Ashley Whillans, Dave Feldman, and Damian Wisniewski

“The Psychology Behind Meeting Overload,” Harvard Business Review. November 12, 2021

post-game meeting

Confirm key decisions and next steps. Recap what was decided in the meeting, who is accountable for following through, when implementation will occur, and how it will be communicated. You want every attendee to leave the meeting with the same understanding of what was agreed, so there’s little chance of anyone reopening the issues later…

Develop communication points. If a colleague not at the meeting asks an attendee “What happened?” he or she should know what to say. So before you wrap up, put the question to the group. “What are the most important things we accomplished in our time here together?” As the group responds, capture the key points on a flip chart or whiteboard and briefly summarize them. Once you have alignment on what should be communicated to others ask everyone if there are any parts of the discussion that they wouldn’t want to be shared. Some information might be confidential; perhaps some ideas aren’t quite ready for dissemination. Be as specific as possible here so everyone clearly understands what is off limits. Then, as soon as possible after the meeting, send your agreed-upon talking points to everyone in an email. The goal of this exercise is not to give people a script to read from. It’s to provide guidance on the key messages they should convey, and what they should keep to themselves, if asked, so the rest of the organization gets a consistent picture of what went on. After a recent strategy meeting of the top 30 executives at a major technology company, for example, the group decided on these communication points:

• This was not a one-time event, but the beginning of this group coming together as a senior leadership team.
• We talked about our strategy, which is to build a collection of great businesses in strong categories.
• We agreed that each business should focus on driving its own growth, but, where it makes sense, units and functions should leverage each other’s best practices and capabilities. We captured some ideas for how to start doing this and talked about opportunities for leaders to grow and take on new boundary-spanning roles.

 

Bob Frisch and Cary Greene

“Don’t End a Meeting Without Doing These 3 Things,” Harvard Business Review. April 26, 2016 as quoted in HBR Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter. Harvard Business Review Press. 2016.