What Does ‘Recurring Meeting’ Mean?

Recurring meeting definition:

A recurring meeting is one that repeats on your calendar. Usually, this is weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.

For example, if you are an account manager and every Thursday you meet with the rest of the accounts team to talk about what is happening in your department, that's a recurring meeting.

The frequency at which the meeting recurs is called the meeting cadence. 

Types of recurring meetings

In most organizations, recurring meetings are the most common type of meeting, and can easily come to dominate a person's calendar. These include:

• Staff meetings
• Scrum meetings
• Standing meetings
• Project check-ins
• All-Hands meetings
• Leadership meetings
• One-on-ones
• Team Meetings (Sales, Product, etc...)

Why have recurring meetings?

Recurring meetings are common in many professions. They provide a regular drumbeat of interaction to keep the team on track.

A recurring meeting is also a good way to get every employee in the organization connected to each other's projects and tasks.

Recurring meetings are also a great tool for managing interdepartmental workflow as it keeps everyone updated on what's happening with their project/task.

They can help with onboarding new team members as they can easily sync them into the existing weekly, monthly or bi-weekly meeting schedule.

Are recurring meetings effective?

Recurring meetings are effective in some situations. They help bring your team together, remind everyone of the direction the company is heading, and keep everyone aware of what's happening.  

When recurring meetings are not effective, it is because they are disorganized, too long, too frequent, too detailed, or simply unnecessary.

If you suspect your recurring meetings aren't pulling their weight, talk to the person who organizes the meeting about whether they can be improved by refining the agenda, or moving some of the meeting content into other asynchronous communication channels.

See here for help getting meetings canceled.

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How to set up a recurring meeting in Google Calendar

1)  Go to the Calendar  

2)  Click the time and day of the week you want for your meeting

3) Near the clock icon, you'll see the date and time, and a small message that says, "Does not repeat." Click that area to expand it.

4) Now again, where it says "Does not repeat", click to expand options.

5) Choose from the options: Daily, Weekly on [Day], Monty on the Nth Day, Annually, Every weekday (Monday to Friday), or Custom. Choose Custom allows you to set an end to date or number of recurrences.

6) Configure the rest of the meeting normally, such as by adding guests, a location, video conferencing, and a description

7) Click Save 

How to schedule a recurring meeting in Outlook

1) Create a meeting request in one of the following ways

 a. From the Inbox, select New Items > Meeting

 b. From the Calendar, select New Meeting

 c. From an email message, select Reply with Meeting

2) Add attendees to the To line of the meeting request

3) Add a meeting subject, start time, end time, and location

4) Click Meeting > Recurrence

5) Add options for a recurrence pattern. Note that this changes the Meeting tab to Meeting Series.

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