Meeting Etiquette

Good meeting etiquette really comes down to two things: who’s in the room, and how everyone behaves once they’re there. Get invitations right and you’ll have fewer, smaller, more effective meetings. Set expectations around devices and attention, and the meetings you do hold will actually be worth the time.

When to Invite / When to Attend

How many times have you (or someone you work with) complained about never getting any real work done because you’re booked with back-to-back-to-back meetings all day long? We’ve all heard it countless times, but what really drives me crazy is that when I ask what they’re doing about it, they turn into a defeatist and claim: “It’s out of my hands.”… Wrong answer.

This problem happens to all of us, but what 95% of us forget is that the solution is in our control. At the end of the day, the responsibility for knowing who belongs in a meeting lies with both the sender and the receiver.

When to invite someone to a meeting

The next time you’re creating a meeting invite, use these guidelines to keep your meetings smaller. Remember, smaller meetings are more effective meetings — and if you start using these tricks, chances are your coworkers will too, and you’ll have fewer meetings to attend:

• The Required, Optional, and Resource (think Bcc for meetings) options are there for a reason — use them.
• If a particular attendee is critical to the meeting, call it out in the message body or assign them to specific agenda items.
• Instead of including an entire team, consider asking the team to choose a single representative to attend.
• A simple rule of thumb: if in doubt, leave the person out. That may sound harsh, but you’re most likely doing them a favor.

When to accept a meeting invite

Another invite pops up in your inbox. What do you do?

• Don’t just blindly accept every invite. Read the message first — you may see right away that you don’t need to attend.
• If you decide you don’t need to be there but see that your boss is on the invite (or worse, sent it), don’t just resign yourself to going. First, ask what your role in the meeting is. If the organizer hesitates or is unsure, there’s your answer.
• Tell your boss you have another task that needs your time and ask if it’s OK to skip. More often than not they’ll say yes — and be glad you proactively avoided wasting another hour of company time.
• Decline but stay informed. You don’t always have to be in the room to provide value; reading the minutes and following up on any actions assigned to you is enough sometimes.

If you’re going to decline, always do so politely. Even if the meeting doesn’t mean much to you, the organizer put time and effort into planning it. And it’s far better to politely decline beforehand than to sneak out ten minutes in once you realize you don’t need to be there. Don’t be that person.

Technology in Meetings

Once the right people are in the room, the next etiquette question is what they’re allowed to do with their laptops and phones. Constant connectivity can be a powerful tool: looking up a number on the spot, sharing a web-based demo, doing a group review of a document. But the same devices are also the fastest way to lose the room’s attention.

The knee-jerk reaction is to ban devices outright. That’s usually a mistake: you lose all the benefits along with the distractions, and you don’t fix the root cause. (Remember 37signals’ Boycott A Meeting Day? Rather than scrapping meetings entirely, it’s better to make them better. Same idea here.) Moderation and clear boundaries work better than an outright ban.

A simple rule of thumb: if what you’re doing on your device is more important than the meeting itself, you probably shouldn’t be in the meeting.

If you’re a participant:

• Turn off all sound, including vibration.
• Don’t take calls in the room — step into the hallway if you must.
• You can research topics relevant to the meeting, type notes, or share your screen to a projector for everyone to see.
• You should not surf the web, message other people in the room, or text on the side.
• If you’re taking notes on your laptop, share them with the organizer afterward.
• Never, ever play games or check social media in a meeting.
• If you have a more important task and you aren’t critical to the meeting, don’t go.

If you’re organizing the meeting:

• Set ground rules before the meeting starts.
• Assign a note-taker and let everyone know who it is. (A sneaky trick: assign it to whoever has their laptop open when the meeting starts. Do that a few times and open laptops disappear.)
• Tell people you respect their time and want to keep the meeting short, and that their full attention is what makes it valuable.

And if you’re still not getting the attention you think you deserve, take a moment to consider why. Maybe the person firing off emails shouldn’t have been invited in the first place. Or maybe the meeting itself wasn’t necessary. Etiquette cuts both ways.