Essential Skills for Workplace Newcomers: Being an Effective Meeting Organizer

In the workplace, everyone has opportunities to serve as a meeting organizer. Perhaps your boss is a project manager who delegates meeting coordination to you, or you might be the meeting organizer yourself. For newcomers with limited work experience, there’s often pressure when you need to contact and gather senior colleagues or those with higher positions for meetings. Even sending an email might cause hesitation. This article addresses these situations, explaining what a qualified meeting organizer needs to be aware of and potential pitfalls to avoid, minimizing the chances of colleagues rolling their eyes at you. As my boss once said, scheduling meetings may seem trivial, but when you take care of all the details, your colleagues’ trust and perception of your professionalism will increase, opening opportunities for more important responsibilities.

This article focuses on medium to large cross-departmental meetings with at least five participants. The emphasis on cross-departmental meetings is important because the frequency of daily interactions between different departments may be low, making proper etiquette and formality necessary. A reputation for being too formal or polite is far better than being perceived as careless or disrespectful. This article doesn’t cover situations where, despite being cross-departmental, the parties interact frequently and are familiar enough that casually walking over to suggest a meeting is normal.

Background

I work at the Taiwan headquarters of a large multinational company with dozens of branch stores across Taiwan. Due to business needs, I often organize meetings with store managers and conduct online meetings with headquarters colleagues and international teams.

For communication tools, our company primarily uses Google’s system as the administrative platform, with all meeting scheduling done through Google Calendar. Therefore, the following explanations will use Google Calendar as the primary tool, though I believe most of the logic applies to other tools as well.

I. Confirming Meeting Times

The biggest challenge in scheduling meetings is finding suitable times, especially when there are many participants or high-level attendees whose schedules are always packed. Rescheduling repeatedly is common. Here are some common scenarios and solutions.

1) List Several Time Slots in Advance

Providing time slots for people to choose from turns the response into a yes/no or multiple-choice question rather than an open-ended one, making it easier for both you and the respondents. If all your suggested times are rejected, ask the other party to propose more suitable times.

Another important purpose of listing times in advance is to reserve meeting rooms. Many companies have specific protocols for booking meeting rooms. You can reserve all potential time slots in advance to avoid the embarrassment of finally agreeing on a time only to discover no meeting rooms are available. Even worse is forgetting to book a meeting room altogether, leaving everyone staring at you when the meeting time arrives.

2) Prioritize the Highest-Ranking Person

To arrange a good meeting time, you need to accommodate the busiest person first, which usually means the highest-ranking official. If attendees include both A and their supervisor B, you can first ask A if they have viewing access to B’s calendar. If they do, you’ve successfully taken the first step; if not, you can give your pre-selected time slots to A and ask them to confirm with their supervisor before responding to you.

3) Privately Inquire About Common Schedules

Once, I needed to schedule an online meeting with store managers from 15-20 branches. Since store managers have the same position, they often share common schedules, such as Monday morning manager meetings or Wednesday afternoon annual planning meetings. You can privately ask a manager you’re familiar with, or one who seems approachable, about their common schedules to eliminate many unsuitable possibilities.

4) Consider Time Zones for International Meetings

If the meeting includes participants from multiple countries, remember to ask about their time zones in advance. When discussing meeting times via email, kindly include the times for each time zone. Providing sufficient information for quick decision-making is also a mark of professionalism.

II. Sending Meeting Invitations

1) Include an Agenda

Everyone fears long, pointless meetings. To avoid this, preparing an agenda in advance is essential. Besides clearly stating the meeting’s purpose and helping the host control time, the agenda also informs attendees about what materials or content they need to prepare. Here’s an example agenda:

10:00 – 10:20 APP Development Progress (by Alex)
10:20 – 10:40 Marketing Campaign Planning (by Tina)
10:40 – 11:00 Departmental Coordination (by Leo)

Of course, the agenda must be confirmed with the relevant parties first to avoid confusion after sending the notification. Additionally, if your boss is the actual meeting organizer and you’re just the executor, it’s advisable to confirm the agenda with your boss before confirming with others.

2) Add Meeting Room or Address to the Meeting Title

Although Google Calendar has a field for meeting rooms, consider that everyone is busy and calendars can be overwhelming. Making attendees click on meeting details for location information isn’t very thoughtful. One solution is to add the meeting room name directly after the meeting subject. If the meeting isn’t held within the company, remember to include the address. Examples of meeting titles:

Annual Planning Meeting@Meeting Room A
Product Development Meeting@Taipei City, Xinyi District xxx

3) Change the Event’s Display Color

In Google Calendar, the default color is grayish-blue. If this meeting is extremely important and needs to stand out, you can change its display color in the calendar. Trust me, most people don’t modify this feature, so your meeting notification will immediately stand out.

III. Confirm Key Person’s Attendance

Don’t assume your job is done after sending the meeting notification. In Google Calendar, everyone can respond whether they’ll attend. If a key person hasn’t responded, remember to directly confirm with them whether they can attend.

Since everyone has different work habits, some people might know they have a meeting that doesn’t conflict with their schedule but consistently fail to click “attend,” or simply overlook it. I used to be that person who never clicked “attend” until my boss pointed out, “You need to let the meeting organizer know your intentions promptly.”

Regardless of the situation, if you sent the meeting notification, you’re responsible for confirming whether key persons can attend.

IV. Send Confirmation Email After the Meeting

Many people have experienced this situation: during the meeting, everyone is harmonious, agreeing on plans and who will execute them, but afterward, people change their minds and tell different stories. Many workplace conflicts start here.

To prevent decisions from being overturned after the meeting or everyone completely forgetting the discussion, I strongly recommend sending the decisions made during the meeting to all attendees afterward, adding discussion details as needed. Although determined individuals can still pretend they didn’t see the email, this method provides maximum protection for yourself—an extremely important piece of advice many workplace seniors have shared with me.