If your company has implemented a hybrid work schedule and return to office (RTO) policies, you’ve no doubt seen ghost meetings: the conference room shows a meeting about to start, but the room is totally empty. Where are all the attendees? Is everyone just running late? Nope, they’re all working from home today, but no one thought to remove the conference room from the meeting invite!
I get it, managing calendar invites and room reservations is annoying. Who has time to check every meeting each day to see if everyone happens to be WFH, especially when people are similarly lackadaisical about updating their Work Location each day?
The problem is that ghost meetings are a huge barrier to RTO satisfaction. When it’s hard to find conference rooms for in-person meetings and everyone ends up taking meetings from their desk or a phone room, people start to grumble about “why am I even in the office if we’re all on this meeting virtually anyway?” It also defeats some of the point of bringing people back to the office if they can’t easily collaborate together. And it’s not just an annoyance and morale killer, these rooms are valuable resources that are not being well utilized, costing businesses real money.
Since it’s unrealistic to expect people will manually remove unneeded conference rooms from meetings, no matter how much we cajole them, why don’t our calendaring systems do this for us? Why hasn’t Google implemented automatic ghost meeting detection/resolution to Google Calendar? It’s been 4 years since people started RTOing after COVID, and ghost meetings just keep getting worse with no solution in sight? It shouldn’t be hard — Google has the info on who is in the office and who is invited to the meeting, so why haven’t they fixed this?
Maybe there’s a good reason why Google hasn’t addressed this issue. Maybe this would make their own internal RTO numbers look worse? Maybe they laid off the whole team that works on Google Calendar? Maybe they’re waiting for their Gemini AI to fix it for them automatically?
So if Google won’t fix it, they could at least empower companies to fix it themselves. Here’s how that would work: company engineers could write an Apps Script to check the work location of each invitee and if all are set to Home, then remove the conference room from the meeting. I’ve actually written similar scripts before to check for people who haven’t RSVP’d and send them a gentle reminder (people who’ve worked with me will remember getting emails from “Jedbot”). But here’s where I think Google really doesn’t care - they don’t currently provide the Work Location data for invitees as something that can be queried from a script, and my Feature Request for them to add work location data to Apps Script has been outstanding for almost 3 years now: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/234475027.
So the first step is just to get Google to care a tiny bit. If ghost meetings are a problem for you, please click the link above and click the +1 icon to add your vote to my feature request. Maybe if enough people add their voice, Google will finally do the bare minimum and empower their customers to fix this problem.
P.S. In case you think this is futile, I actually have precedent for encouraging people to nag Google into action. My old Chrome extension, the Shared Slides Clicker, provided instructions and encouraged users to notify Google and request they add the “co-presenter” functionality to Google Meet. 3 years after I first shipped my Chrome extension Google finally added the feature to Google Meet. Since my Work Location feature request above is approaching 3 years old, maybe we don’t have much longer to wait 🤞
