How to Manage Multi-Person Meeting Types for Team Members on Calendly

No matter what type of meeting you’ve got in mind, it’s hard to find times and formats that work for every invitee. That’s where Calendly Teams comes into play.

Online meetings come in all shapes and sizes. You might have one or one hundred invitees. Your team may work across time zones. You might need to balance out the meeting assignments between your team so that no one becomes overloaded.

Calendly Teams can save you time. With the multi-person meeting types you’ll see in this tutorial, you’ve got every option you need to schedule your team.

Manage Multi-Person Meetings on Calendly (QuickStart Video)

Have you got a multi-person meeting to schedule? Calendly makes scheduling a snap with it’s easy to use multi-person meeting tools. Learn how to save meeting planning time in this short quick start video:

Learn all about multi-person meetings in the rest of this tutorial.

What Are Calendly Team Meetings?

If you’ve ever scheduled a meeting, these problems might sound familiar to you:

• Trouble finding compatible times. Work schedules vary, and meetings aren’t our only commitments. The hard part is aligning to times that work for everyone.
• Working across time zones. Maybe your team spans a variety of time zones, and it’s constantly confusing whether you’re discussing “my 12pm or your 12pm?” You need a tool like Calendly that brings alignment on time zones.
• Back-and-forth emails with invitees. Setting up meetings via email leads to tedious email chains with proposed times and counter-proposals. Instead of scheduling via email, Calendly lets you set your availability, then asks the invitee to find a working time that fits it.

Thanks to Calendly, scheduling meetings doesn’t have to be painful. Calendly is flexible and works no matter which meeting platform you prefer, like Microsoft Teams or Zoom, for example. It’s the tool you need to make scheduling easier so that you can spend more time collaborating and less time calendaring.

Calendly Team Meetings help to bring together your colleagues in one common group. It’s the easiest way to align schedules, assign meetings, and monitor availability and usage. It’s the best tool to help you spend less time scheduling meetings so that you can re-focus on the meeting content.

Here’s the thing: Calendly gives you all the power you need to schedule meetings. It’s pliable to every type of team and meeting you need to host. Schedule sessions between a few minutes and a few hours. You can automatically assign meeting hosts based on location, availability, and more.

Calendly gives you an easy-to-book link to send to an invitee. The shareable page includes a calendar that considers your team’s available time, and shifts setting a time to the recipient. It stays up-to-date with your team’s calendars, then offers the recipient a time that works for everyone.

Meetings take many forms, and Calendly helps you schedule them all. Here are three types of meetings you can create with just a few clicks in Calendly:

• Round robin meetings. Your team might work in shifts or take turns covering available time slots. With a round robin meeting, Calendly helps you automatically assign someone on your team to take on meetings based on availability.
• Collective meetings. When you need many members of your team in a meeting, a collective meeting is the perfect option. Calendly makes it easy to find overlapping availability and offer a collective meeting to your invitee.
• Group meetings. If you want many invitees to join your meeting, then a group meeting is the perfect option. 

With these three types of meetings, you can host practically any type of conversation. Calendly makes scheduling seamless and gets you back to doing the work at hand. Read on to see how to set these meetings up and learn more about which meeting might fit you best.

The Power of Calendly Teams

Before we review Calendly’s multi-person meeting types, it’s important to know how Calendly scheduling works. These features work smoothly when you’ve set up your Calendly team. This brings together your colleagues and co-workers into a common group, making it easy to create meetings.

How to Set Up Meetings in Calendly

For the rest of this tutorial, we’re going to highlight the power of the three event multi-person types:

1. Round Robin
2. Collective
3. Group

These meetings are for Calendly Teams. Each of the three meeting types helps your team to collaborate to meet with others in a different way.

After you set up your team, create a new event to set up your new meeting type. You’ll see the three options for Calendly team multi-person meetings shown below.

After you set up an event, Calendly creates a URL that’s easy for a recipient to use to book a meeting. Based on the type of event you create, Calendly handles the backend work of creating an invite, sending it to your team, and booking a time for a meeting that works for all.

Keep reading to find out which meeting might be right for you. There are a variety of options you’ll set for each event but start by selecting one of these three meeting types.

How to Use Round Robin Meetings in Calendly

More teams than ever work across many time zones across the world. In a remote-first world, our teams are distributed—and so are their work schedules.

So, if you need to cover a variety of time slots, (and don’t want to stay up 24 hours in a row!) how do you ensure that you distribute meetings based on availability? Or, how do you spread meetings to team members so that no one feels overburdened?

This is the power of a round robin meeting. When you hear “round robin,” think of the word “balancing.” Calendly does the heavy lifting of routing these types of events.

Round robin meetings are ideal for all the following:

• Distributed teams. As mentioned in the intro, the need to split work up over the available hours has never been greater.
• Many possible hosts. Let’s say that you’ve got a highly qualified team of aces, and everyone is able to host a successful meeting. In these scenarios, it’s tempting to always route a meeting to your top pro. But this may overload your team lead, so let a round robin keep their workload balanced.
• Promoting equal opportunity. Sometimes, it’s easy to assign tasks to your most senior team members. But this doesn’t give your up and coming stars a chance. With a round robin meeting, you automate the work of rotating opportunities.

To set up a round robin event, make sure to select Choose Round Robin when you set up a team event. Then, notice an important setting in the Team Members & Location setting.

For each meeting, make sure that you set your Round Robin Distribution setting. You can choose between Optimize for Availability and Optimize for Equal Distribution settings.

Assigning meetings based on availability helps to balance your workload. The availability setting prioritizes time zones and open slots. Equal distribution keeps every team member with a similar number of meetings.

Remember, round robin meetings are all about balance. Choose this option to create distribution within your Calendly teams with the two settings highlighted above.

How to Use Collective Meetings in Calendly

Need several members of your team in a meeting? You should set up a collective meeting.

Here’s the great thing about collective meetings: they help you find times when everyone is available. Your team might have a variety of work schedules and busy hours. Calendly automates the work of harmonizing those calendars, offering times that are mutually available.

Every team member needs to set available working hours in their personal settings so that collective meetings work. Think of collective scheduling as “Venn diagram” scheduling, with the overlapping circles of availability offered for meetings.

Here are just a few meetings that work well as a collective:

• Interviews. Team interviews help you to gauge how a candidate handles working within a group setting. Bring a collective meeting together for a panel interview.
• Technical support. Sometimes, you need more than one person on the line to solve more technical challenges. In these situations, a collective meeting brings together multiple members of your team in a single setting. Your users and customers are sure to appreciate the “many-to-one” resources offered in a collective.
• Project review teams. If you’ve got several team members voting to “go” or “no-go” on a project, you’ll need multiple parties to go over the details. Make scheduling a project review easier with a collective meeting.

Collective meetings should be your go-to when you need more than one member of your team on the line simultaneously. Make sure to choose Choose Collective on the Create Team Event type menu.

The most important setting is your own time zone and available hours. Make sure to connect your calendar and set your time zone so that the collective finds time slots that work for everyone.

How to Use Group Meetings in Calendly

Want to bring together many invitees at once? You’re looking for a group meeting. It’s one of the Calendly Teams event types, and it’s perfect for bringing large audiences together.

A group meeting is the perfect choice when you’re presenting. Here are a few examples of occasions where group meetings might be useful:

• Webinars. If you’re hosting many people at once, a webinar is a great way to give “one-to-many” training. Offering this type of event in Calendly is a great idea because it’s so easy to find times that work for everyone.
• Training sessions. Use a group meeting to set up training sessions for a large list of invitees. It’s a great way to scale up your teaching efforts.
• Company events. There’s nothing better than holding a periodic town hall. This gives your company a chance to share the latest results and products, plus ask for feedback. It’s the perfect occasion to use Calendly Teams group meetings.

When you set up a group meeting, make sure to check out the Max invitees in a spot option. It’s a great way to maintain a set number of meeting users in case you want to address questions one-on-one. 

It’s important to set times that work for your group. As you set the schedule, make sure you choose between the Use their schedule and Set custom hours options. Then, dial in your perfect time blocks to offer a meeting.

Once you set up a group meeting, be on the lookout for bookings! You’re now ready to present, teach, and share with audiences of any size.

Start Using Calendly for Multi-Person Meetings Today

By now, you’ve seen the power of Calendly teams and the many meetings that it helps you set up. Start by creating your team, then decide what type of meeting works best for you. With the power of Calendly Teams, you can create events that match every meeting you can dream of.

Remember, when you use Calendly, you remove scheduling friction and find the best times for everyone.