Email Etiquette for Outlook Meetings
- From self-help books to newspaper advice columns, questions about etiquette have been asked for decades, often with conflicting answers. While there may be entire guidebooks on proper etiquette when preparing hard-copy invitations for meetings, all sense seems to fly out the window when it turns to online meeting invitations. Although the Microsoft Outlook software has streamlined meeting requests by allowing mass emails and schedule checking, it is still important and beneficial to meeting requestors' purposes to maintain a high level of etiquette in the email message itself.
- An Outlook email is easy to create. You open the message, type a few words, click through the meeting scheduler, select a date and click the "Send" button. If you give a few thoughts, however, to the etiquette of that email, it may garner a higher response rate. Address the meeting invitees within the email -- even if your email is going to multiple persons at once. A simple "To the Quality Assurance staff" or "To my team members" makes the message seem far more personal. An excuse of "it's just email" won't hold water if the message is also full of typos, spelling errors and grammar issues. When you take a few moments to proofread your message, it shows your respect for the message's intended recipients.
- Another category of etiquette related to Outlook meetings concerns meeting recipients when they are not in front of their Outlook software. Outlook invitation senders may want to consider etiquette such as not planning an extensive meeting at 5 p.m. on a Friday or for 8 a.m. on the first morning back after a three-day weekend. Meeting planners may also want to consider invitees when planning the meetings, such as knowing who is planning to take what day off or whether employees already have multiple meetings that day. One way to reduce the chances of etiquette pitfalls is to use Outlook's meeting scheduler. Outlook lets you see your invitees' calendars so you'll always know who is free and when.
- The main benefit of using proper etiquette when scheduling Outlook meetings is gaining a response to meeting invitations. Poor etiquette may result in email invitations being deleted or, in some cases, declined. Good etiquette puts the meeting -- and the invitation sender, along with the host if they are two different people -- in a beneficial light.