If You're A Manager, Add Details To Your Meeting Invites

The title says it all. Don't send vague meeting invites.

It may be harmless to you, but it causes undue stress to your direct reports.

Picture this:

Your company is doing great! Quarterly numbers are booming, your team has a constant steady stream of work they're crushing, and you're feeling great. You had an idea you're excited about that you wanted to run past one of your direct reports, so right before you head off to lunch you throw a meeting invite on the calendar for when you get back - only you didn't add any clarifying details. No description. Just a subject line that says "Chat" and the teleconference details.

I see this happen all too often.

I bet 99% of the time the sender is just busy, or excited, and doesn't think anything of it. But take a step back and think about it objectively. As the sender, you already know what the meeting's about. As the sender, you're in control of the conversation, and have time to plan what you're going to say. The person you've invited has none of this context, and is left confused and unprepared.

Some people need to prepare

I'm pretty introverted. I'm also pretty knowledgeable about my work and can typically and quickly answer most questions in a (relevant) conversation easily. That being said, if I have the choice I will ALWAYS choose to think about the answer for a bit and get back to you. If I get details in my meeting invite about what you want to speak to me about, you better believe I'm going to look at those details, think about them, and make sure I'm prepared with answers and comments about those details at the time our meeting starts.

The meeting starts quicker as there is less "getting the employee up to speed", and you can go more in depth and consider far more options when you've already thought about the subject.

Like the Cub Scout motto says: Always Be Prepared.

Layoffs

I've been on both sides of company-wide layoffs, and they all had one thing in common. A vague meeting invite by the manager. Listen, I get it. If you're the ~~hiring~~ firing manager you're not going to invite your report to a meeting with a subject line like "Discuss your layoff", "You're Fired", or "DUDE! YOU'RE COOKED!!". These meeting invites do need to be handled delicately. But I'm telling you that is all the more reason that you need to add details to your meetings that aren't about terminations or performance issues.

The 2 times I've been laid off via Zoom, there were no details in the invite. "Chat with Ryan", they stated. They were both invites from my manager, and we had regularly scheduled 1:1 chats scheduled, but these were at irregular dates and times. Did I know? No ... but also yes. I remember the most recent time I did have a hunch, and remembered I had a tough time sleeping that night because I could just feel I was about to get the bad news the next morning, and that's what happened.

You can't really do much about the subject line for a layoff invite, but the point I'm making is unless it's a layoff, add some context.

What do you think? Am I offbase here? Is there any good time to leave details out of a meeting besides a termination?

Let me know, @chapeljuice.dev on Bluesky.