When you send out an invite with an empty text and maybe fuzzy title like “Sync” or “Status” or even “Meeting”, there is a high chance that one of the following things will happen:
1. Your meeting will not be structured, you will not follow a plan and have no clear, measurable outcome.
2. Your invitees will not get a chance to do any prep work; you will lose valuable time in the meeting to bring them up to speed and/or schedule yet another meeting, for when they will have had the time to prep on the topic
3. Your invitees will think you do not really know yourself what this meeting is about and, honestly, they might be right. If you are not able to nail down a few bullet points in the agenda, chances are that you haven’t clarified the meeting’s purpose yourself, and thus the reunion is not really set up for success.
4. If you are the line manager, your invitees might think something bad happened and this is why you are not writing in the agenda. This is true especially in times of uncertainty of big changes inside the company. One of my colleagues once told me “I really thought he wanted to tell me I became redundant, but he only wanted to congratulate me for my birthday.” Even if things might not be that extreme all the time, you are still creating a wave of uncertainty and mystery which are taking one’s mind away from work, rather than focus it on work.
Learn more on how to set up successful meetings in my previous article.