Next time you send an invitation or react to an event invitation take into consideration the following criteria. Are you gonna decline/accept or send more meeting invitations?
3 good reasons to accept a meeting:
- Your expertise needs to be shared with the group to make a decision or conclude some collaborative work
- The topic requires live “sync” (same time) interaction between yourself and others to succeed
- You need to build relationships, or deal with sensitive issues such as negotiation, or conflict resolution with others
6 reasons to decline a meeting:
- There is no clear outcome from the meeting or topic specified in advance
- The wrong people are attending
- The meeting will discuss matters of low relevance to you
- You have no role except to listen
- The meeting objectives would be better delivered in one-to-one discussions, or in smaller sub-teams
- You could meet the objective of the meeting through email.
By implementing this simple technique you as managers make sure everyone attending a meeting feels important, valued and wanted. This for sure increases the sense of belonging of your team.
If you want to find out more, take a look at the PROSPER training modules.
