Scheduling a meeting for a large group of people follows the same process as scheduling for just one or two, but just requires a few extra steps and a bit of intuition.
First, go into your calendar, right click "Shared Calendars" and hover over "Add Calendar" to select "From Address Book":
This will bring up the address book. Enter the names of every person in the search field, separated by hitting "enter" after every name. NOTE: You can only have up to 30 calendars selected to view, so if you're scheduling for more than 30 individual people, you'll need to split up your search.
Your calendar should now look like this:
Your selected calendars will be checked off on the left-hand side of your calendar, as circled. These are the people you're scheduling for.
When scheduling many people, using the "Schedule View" as circled at the top of the screenshot will help tremendously - this view allows you to easily see available and unavailable times without individually checking every person's calendar. It's also a good idea to narrow your view to a single day and use the "</>" arrows next to the date to find a date that works best.
The circled bar represents availability. The hatched pink means Out of Office, and the purple bar means there is something on the calendar for at least one person. What we're looking for is the blank spaces in this bar. In this example, we can see that there is availability for every person from 1:30pm to 2:00pm Eastern on the selected date, June 16.
You're good to go schedule your meeting in this time slot!
A few notes:
- The more people you are scheduling for, the less likely you'll find a blank space on the calendar where everyone is available. In those scenarios, if you are given guidelines on when to schedule your meeting, make a list of the best possible dates and times where more people than not are available. It's okay if one or two people are not able to attend, as long as the majority of people can attend.
- Your guidelines to scheduling these meetings may look like this:
- Regional meeting for everyone in the Seattle, Oakland, Portland, and Los Angeles offices
- Meeting should take place in the second half of the month of August
- Meeting will last for approximately 1.5 hours
- Because there are more than 30 people in the specified offices and their calendars need to be viewed individually, you'll need to break your search up into two parts in order to view every person's calendar.
- There will most likely not be a single time that every person is available. Just try your best to find a day and time that works with most peoples schedules, with special consideration to office directors and managers.
- Many internal meetings can be rescheduled. If you notice that a particular date or time works best for several people, but conflicts with an internal meeting for some, consider scheduling during that time, as internal meetings are easier to move than external (i.e., a weekly check-in between two staff members is easier to move than a public meeting)