what should I say when people miss meetings?

A reader writes:

I’m the president of a small grassroots not-for-profit board and I have plenty of virtual meetings with other board members, volunteers, community partners, and staff for one reason or another. I’m wondering if you have any suggested language for when people no-show for meetings. It’s a relatively minor issue, but it happens often enough to be pretty irritating. I’m not necessarily asking for language about setting expectations for attending meetings in general, but words to use in the immediate aftermath: when I don’t know what happened and so I’m partially worried but also annoyed.

I try to give the benefit of the doubt, so I’ll send things like, “Missed you earlier, I hope everything is alright!” and something about rescheduling. I don’t want to ask them directly what happened because it’s not my business, and I don’t want to sound like I’m lecturing someone about meeting etiquette when they may have had a legitimate emergency. But sometimes people don’t respond at all, or they might go right to the rescheduling part without any kind of explanation. Or worse, there is a bad explanation and still no apology or acknowledgement that they wasted my time. I’ve gone through this and had people no-show for the rescheduled meetings as well.

I know some of this is inevitable because “life,” but at the same time it also seems like some people forget there is an actual human at the other end of a calendar invite. Is there a way to make this clear and dissuade them from doing it again without being a potentially insensitive jerk? I want to make sure there wasn’t a miscommunication about the date/time. I want to make sure they are okay/not incapacitated. But otherwise, ideally I’d want them to know what they did isn’t cool and to please not do it again. I’m a volunteer myself and don’t have the time or bandwidth to wait around and chase after people.

We are fully remote, which makes this more problematic. It would be a lot easier if I could pop by someone’s cubicle to get visual cues and proceed accordingly, but these “conversations” are usually happening over email/Teams.

A few things:

* Can you send out confirmations the morning of the day the meeting is scheduled? Just a quick, “Just wanted to confirm our call for this afternoon. Does 3:00 today still work for you?” Ideally you could automate this.

* If someone does miss a meeting, make it sound like more of an inconvenience than you’re currently doing. “Missed you earlier, I hope everything is alright” is fine if this happens to you a couple of times a year. When it’s happening regularly, I’d switch your language to, “Hi, I’m waiting on the line for our 3pm call — are you still able to join?”

* If someone is a repeat offender, name that specifically: “We’ve scheduled a few meetings where you didn’t show up and I didn’t know so was waiting around, which is tough with my schedule. Is there something we can do differently so that doesn’t happen?” (You might be thinking the “we” there is disingenuous since clearly they are the one who needs to do something differently, but I think it can be genuine; you’re allowing for the possibility that there’s something you could change on your end too, like maybe they think this doesn’t need to be a call at all and you could just email them, or who knows what.)

* If this is happening with paid staff who you manage, you should say, “You’ve missed two scheduled meetings with me recently. Can you do whatever needs to be done with your calendar management to make sure it doesn’t continue to happen?” If it keeps happening after that, treat it like you would any other performance issue; it’s a big deal to repeatedly ghost one’s boss, particularly once they’ve been warned about it. (I’d also be concerned that if they’re doing it to you, their boss, they’re doing it to other people too — possibly including volunteers and donors — and I’d want to poke around to find out.)

Last, because this is happening a lot, it’s worth checking that you’re using people’s time well. Are you guilty of scheduling meetings for things that could have been an email? Or of having meandering calls that take 45 minutes for something that could take 10? In other words, and especially with people who are volunteering their time, are there ways you can ask for less of it? Maybe not! But because it’s happening a lot, it’s something I’d look at. And you might also ask a colleague who you trust to be blunt if they think anything like that is a factor.

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