I do a lot of teleconferences for work and I have recently had a spate of people decline my invitation AFTER the meeting takes place. So the sequence is:
So, is this a new thing in business communications and if so, why?
I know people at my workplace who have their (Microsoft Office) calendar set up to auto-accept all invitations and an administrative assistant is supposed to work out the conflicts.
Maybe the declining afterwards is some way to acknowledge that they were not actually able to attend the meeting.
Maybe their phone keeps sending them annoying reminders of the meeting, and the only way they know how to make it stop is to decline the meeting?
This is what I was going to suggest. They probably didn’t care enough about the meeting to formally decline, but their email is now bugging them about it, so they just need to get rid of it.
I’ve worked in a couple of quite calendar-intense organisations and I’ve not ever encountered that. It sounds pretty dysfunctional - unless these are recurring meetings and the person is declining the series after the event of missing the first one crystallised their thoughts on the rest.
Did those people actually attend the meetings?
If not, maybe they are using the calendar not just for planning, but as a record of which meetings they attended.
Dismissing the reminder is easier than declining the meeting though, isn’t it? The option to dismiss the reminder is usually in the reminder dialog itself - whereas the decline option is inside the calendar event.
Maybe they like having a full forward calendar (because it makes you look too busy to accept additional work), but don’t want to be held to account for meetings they did not actually attend?
It’s easy enough to just block parts of your calendar out for “business planning” or whatever. No need to accept meetings you can’t/won’t attend.
It almost sounds like a bug.
The other thing that occurs to me is a time zone difference. A meeting shows up as 3pm, you don’t check the time zone (2 am in your time), and you accept. You don’t attend and you send a decline afterwards. I would have included an explanation, though, such as “I am not available at 2 am.”
Sorry I wasn’t clear: yes, they participate in the meeting and the decline post hoc.
OK, that is weird, but if you’ve got a bunch of different (unconnected?) people doing it, then I guess it must have sprung out of some methodology they all got trained up on, or some app they are all using, or something like that.
Yes, unconnected people, not at all part of a common organization. So I guess I’ll assume it is a fluke for now, but if this practice spreads for reasons we haven’t come up with, then you read about it here first!
Have you considered asking them? Not in an accusative manner, but a curious one?
You may find it’s an artifact of some combo of certain software these people happen to have in common. e.g. using Microsoft Exchange calendaring from an iPhone. I have certain weirdnesses between my Android phone and my Exchange email/calendar/tasking. I just accept that certain stuff doesn’t play nice together, even though it should.
If I had to hazard a guess, it’d be that there’s some sort of repeated reminder on one device that just won’t go away until/unless the meeting is declined.
What you describe is weird, as they did attend the meeting. I don’t understand; if you learn what’s up, I’ll be interested to read it.
I decline meetings after the fact if I did not attend them, so that weeks in the future when I am trying to figure out what I’ve done or seen or heard, I will not incorrectly see that I attended a meeting.
I regularly clean my Outlook calendar, and I don’t always have control over whether or not a response is sent to the meeting organizer. When given the option to notify the organizer, I always specify “no” (for past meetings), but sometimes rejections are sent out by the server anyway, particularly if I’m cleaning the calendar from my phone rather than the Outlook client.
This is exactly what I do. No idea what purpose declining a meeting in the past that you attended serves.
Maybe their supervisor told them to charge that time to some other project, and make the calendar consistent with it?
Just one possibility, but no idea if it is true in your case.
I assume you are using Microsoft Outlook. If your Exchange server is set up to not auto-delete calendar meetings after a certain time period (90 days, 1 year, whatever), and the memory that you are given for your mailbox is limited, calendar items can end up taking up a lot of that space.
For example, I just checked my own situation. I am currently using about 1.5 GB. About a quarter of that is used by my calendar. If my organization limited me to 500 MB of space, my calendar would take up most of it. There is a chance that these are people who have run into space problems in the past, and so they proactively manage their calendars after meetings have passed by.
This, by the way, is why I rarely attach docs to calendar invites. While it is convenient to have the meeting docs right with the meeting details, it makes it too easy for those docs to disappear into old calendar items, taking up considerable amounts of space.