It is imperative that you use co-organizers for meetings that are important, repeating, or for a team member. Through video conferencing it allows us to connect with people around the world. Most information workers have created numerous meeting invitations to create human connections. For some workers, they have been asked to create meetings for others within their team or department. This indicates the need to add co-organizers to meetings to ensure success.
Why Use Co-Organizers for Meetings?
The most common need for assigning co-organizers to your meetings is when creating a reoccurring meeting. You may intend to participate in all the meetings however, that may not always be the case. You may get sick or take a vacation over two weeks leaving your team in the dark. Even with your absence the meeting must go on. A second common scenario would be an individual on a team, (think Corporate Communications or Training and Development departments) is designated to be the one to create all meetings for the team to ensure uniformity. This could cause the organizer to have meetings overlapping. It would be impossible to attend all meetings created causing a huge gap in ability to properly host each one.
In Microsoft Teams there are certain things that only the organizer of the meeting can do. For example, only the organizer can create break out rooms. The organizer would be the only one to look over the attendance report. In some cases, only an organizer will be allowed to start a meeting or allow those in the meeting lobby to join. Without an organizer a meeting may not be able to run smoothly.
How to Add Co-Organizers
Anyone who has used M365 for any length of time, knows it is constantly evolving and changing. Originally, to get to the meeting options to add co-organizers a button would appear on the ribbon once a meeting was fully created. During my team’s office hours, we noticed that button was no longer available. The link to get to the meeting options is now built into the actual invitation. Look at image 1 below and notice the link in the bottom left labeled for organizers.
Image 1
When the link is clicked, the meeting organizer is taken to a web page to finetune the meeting options to their specifications. The initial page the meeting creator is greeted with is shown in image 2. Notice on the left part of the page there are five different categories to choose from. The category “Roles,” is where you will have the option to add meeting organizers. A word of warning, only attendees from your organization may be added as a co-organizer. It is also worthy to note, only those invited to the meeting may be promoted to co-organizers for meetings.
Image 2
Once on the “Roles,” page you will find adding a co-organizer to the meeting straightforward. There will be a dropdown labeled, “Choose co-organizers,” where any eligible attendees can be promoted to a co-organizer. Select the appropriate individuals for the role. Once selected you will see those individuals in the appropriate location. See Image 3 for a reference. Once added, do not forget to hit the save button at the bottom of the screen.
Image 3
Conclusion
Creation of meetings is easy. Just ask any information worker with a full calendar and they will be happy to confirm it. Ensuring success of those meetings will take extra thought, but the end result would be worth it. To ensure success be sure to add co-organizers for meetings. This will allow your peers and coworkers be able to use important meetings even when you are not available.