What is a Round Robin Meeting?

What Is a Round Robin Meeting? (Benefits, Tools, Use Cases, etc.)

Atlassian surveyed workers, and 78% said they’re expected to attend so many meetings that it hinders their work.

This survey indicates a crucial point: Employees want to attend fewer meetings, join key meetings only, and focus on completing their tasks.

In sales and support teams, for example, some employees end up handling more meetings than others, and this makes them feel exploited. They do not have time to prepare contracts or fix customer issues.

This is where the Round robin meeting comes in. Instead of assigning meetings manually or sharing tasks unevenly, round-robin scheduling helps you share these work elements more fairly among team members.

In this article, we’ll look at what a round-robin meeting is, how it works, and its benefits. We will also discuss some of the best tools for round-robin scheduling.

Without further ado, let’s get into it!

Key Takeaways:

• A round-robin meeting is a system that automatically distributes meetings across designated employees.
• Teams use a round-robin system for workload balance, efficiency, and fair meeting distribution.
• The best round robin meeting software include: 1. Meetergo, 2. Calendly, 3. HubSpot Meetings, and 4. Chili Piper.
• Sales, customer service, and recruiting teams use round robin meetings in their workflow.

What is a Round Robin Meeting?

A round-robin meeting is a method that automatically distributes meetings evenly across employees to ensure a balanced workload.

Let’s say you manage 15 Sales Development Reps (SDRs) and have a booking page that allows leads to book calls with your team. Without a round-robin system, you will manually assign each call to a different member. Chances are you will say, “John, you will handle this client” or “Who is available to take care of this client?” The problem is that some SDRs will end up with more work and feel unhappy.

However, a round-robin system automatically assigns the call to an available SDR to ensure fairness and workload balance.

Let’s discuss this further.

How a Robin Round Meeting Works

In a Round Robin meeting setup, the system assigns booked meetings to a group of team members (hosts) in a rotating sequence. Simply put, it identifies who is available among the members and assigns them the incoming meeting.

Using a meeting scheduling software is the best way to set up an automatic round-robing system. It's a tool that helps you create appointment booking pages where clients or team members can book meetings.

I will use meetergo for the illustration.

Before you can access the round-robin meeting feature, you must create a meeting.

There are two types of meetings:

• Single Host
• Team

Select “Team” since we want to rotate meetings among multiple team members.

Next, choose the Round-Robin meeting type.

Select the team that will host this meeting type. For this illustration, I will choose the “Business Consultation Team.”

Give your meeting a title and a short description, choose the duration(e.g., 30 minutes), and select the venue(e.g., Google Meet). Afterward, publish your meeting type.

Under the “When can people book” section, you can check each host's availability and adjust it if necessary. These are the people the system will assign the booked meetings to.

Selecting “Hosts & Invitees” lets you see the available hosts in the round-robin pool. In my case, there are Ricky, Lisa, and Bonny.

As a side note, you can also enable host selection. This option lets users choose a host when booking, and you can make it a mandatory requirement.

Now, your Round-Robin Meeting is ready. Go ahead and share it or embed it on your website.

After clicking the link, Meetergo takes users to the booking page, where they can schedule a meeting and choose their preferred date and time.

Once they have booked, Meetergo automatically assigns a host to the meeting. In this case, it assigned Lisa to the user.

Meetergo will also notify you about the host assigned to the user.

Once someone has booked another meeting, Meetergo will assign it to another team member.

And there you have it. You have witnessed how a round-robin meeting works.

Key Benefits of Round Robin Meetings

Round-robin meetings have four key benefits:

• Workload Balance
• Increased Efficiency and
• Fair Distribution.

Let’s discuss each of them in more detail.

1. Workload Balance

According to the Harvard Business Review, about 65% of managers from different industries believe that meetings keep them from completing their work.

When you assign meetings manually, some team members will end up with too many, while others receive too few. Round-robin scheduling, however, distributes meetings so that everyone gets a fair share.

Moreover, you can adjust your round-robin meeting settings so that more experienced team members have slightly more meetings because of their expertise. Meanwhile, newer team members can take on fewer meetings at first to build their skills and confidence.

2. Increased Efficiency

Like I indicated earlier, companies mainly use a round robin meeting system to improve efficiency. At meetergo, we’ve noticed that sales, support, and recruitment teams mainly implement this system in their workflow, which makes sense.

Let’s take a customer support team in a SaaS company as an example. They are in charge of handling technical issues enterprise customers raise, and some issues require a video call where a team member solves the customer’s problem live.

With a manual system, the Chief Customer Officer (CCO) must check every member's schedule and assign tasks. With round-robin scheduling, however, they have a system that instantly finds the next available teammate and assigns the meeting to them; there is no manual work, and there are no delays.

The team can focus on solving customer issues instead of sorting out calendars.

Studies show that employees spend about 31 hours monthly in meetings, and 50% of that time is considered a waste.

Without a doubt, manually allocating meetings is inefficient, time-consuming, and prone to mistakes. Round-robin meeting scheduling handles such tasks automatically, so your team spends less time organizing and more time doing actual work.

3. Fair Distribution

No one likes to feel like they’re always stuck with the most meetings. A round-robin system helps with fair distribution by rotating calls evenly across a team. This will prevent situations where the same person is overloaded with meetings.

Wei-Gang Tang and Christian Vandenberghe, researchers affiliated with the Department of Management at HEC Montréal, conducted a research called Role Overload and Work Performance.

As defined by the article, role overload is a work condition where people perceive role demands as exceeding their time, energy, and capabilities. In simple terms, it means if an employee feels like they have more work than they can reasonably handle.

In their research, they found that people who had too much on their plates started feeling overwhelmed, anxious, and mentally drained. Plus, that stress made their performance worse. The more stressed they felt, the harder it was to concentrate, make decisions, or do quality work.

This research also confirms the results Workhuman got after surveying 1,000 full-time employees in the USA. They found that 80% report they have “productivity anxiety,” and over one-third have it multiple times a week.

Without a doubt, a round-robin system improves productivity and efficiency, and prevents burnout.

However, there is another advantage that people often ignore: results.

A fair distribution allows team members to shine and prove their skills and worth. For example, each SDR has a chance to close more deals, or a recruiter has the opportunity to hire the perfect candidate.

With an unfair distribution, however, the same employees outperform their colleagues.

Set Up a Round Robin Meeting in 4 Steps

There are at least four major points to take into account when setting up a round robin meeting:

1. Define Who Is in the Rotation
2. Set Up Meeting Assignment Rules
3. Use Scheduling Software to Automate the Meeting Distribution
4. Monitor and Adjust for Fairness

Let’s look at each one of them.

1. Define Who Is in the Rotation

Your first step is to identify the team members who will be a part of the round-robin scheduling. This is important for using your resources to the maximum and ensuring you leave nobody out.

There is also the reason for fairness I mentioned above. It will prevent anyone from being overloaded when others have fewer responsibilities.

Once you have identified them, use a tool that manages users and rotates meetings. Meetergo helps you do this simply by enlisting all the members of a round-robin group. In addition, you can remove host members from the rotation.

It is also essential to ensure that all hosts have similar roles and skills to handle the assigned meetings. For instance, if you have set up a round-robin meeting for client support, all hosts should be customer service representatives.

This step will help you avoid assigning meetings to a host who does not have the expertise to assist a client in that regard.

2. Set Up Meeting Assignment Rules

Next, you must establish clear guidelines for assigning meetings in your round-robin schedule. One factor to consider here is Availability. It allows you to set or customize the availability for each host.

First, locate the host whose availability you want to modify and click ‘Change.’ In this example, I’ll change Ricky’s availability.

I can set Ricky’s working hours to match his availability. This way, if a meeting falls outside his availability, the round-robin system will not choose him because he won’t be available.

Another interesting setting is the Host Selection Settings.

Meetergo gives you the possibility to:

• Allow users to choose their host when booking
• Make host selection mandatory
• Allow attendees to add other guests to the meeting.

3. Use Scheduling Software to Automate the Meeting Distribution

Now that you have set up your meeting assignment rules, you need to use scheduling tools like Meetergo to assign incoming meetings to team members automatically.

These tools let you set up and activate round-robin rules so that meetings rotate across the group without manual management. You select round robin as the meeting type.

Then, you will end up with a booking page similar to this.

Once a lead schedules a call, Meetergo will check which meeting host is next in line (or available) and automatically route the meeting to them.

Meetergo also syncs with Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, and Customer Relationship Management software (CRMs) like HubSpot, so the process fits smoothly into your team’s workflow.

4. Monitor and Adjust for Fairness

After setting up your round-robin system, you can monitor how often hosts have meetings and adjust where necessary.

For instance, you might notice that team host A got 18 meetings within one week, while host B only had 6. That’s unfair — even if it was unintentional. It could mean that host A has more open time slots or that host B forgot to update their calendar availability.

To fix this, you can, for example:

— Adjust availability settings so each teammate has similar open hours.

— Set booking limits per day to avoid overloading any team member.

This way, each host is getting a fair amount of meetings to attend to.

4 Best Tools for Round Robin Scheduling

Many tools help you automate round-robin meetings. These tools allow you to rotate meetings between teammates, check availability, and connect with your calendar or CRM. After testing the round-robin features of over 10 tools, here are the ones I recommend:

1. Meetergo
2. Calendly
3. Hubspots Meeting and
4. Chilli Piper

1. Meetergo

Meetergo comes first on our list as the best round-robin scheduling tool. It helps you offer more scheduling flexibility to your customers by displaying your team’s availability on the booking page, including their working dates, times, and exceptions, if any.

It comes with a Poll feature that allows you to create polls by giving a title and description and choosing the location, time zone, date, and time. You can also set the poll deadlines, hide participant lists, or remove branding.

In addition, it has a Booking feature that lets you see all your clients and meetings, including upcoming, finished, canceled, and unconfirmed meetings. You can edit, reschedule, delete, filter, or even mark a meeting as a no-show.

What’s more, you can create booking pages by choosing the host, naming the meeting, providing a description, and choosing a duration and venue. It also has a phone call option that allows you to call the attendee directly.

2. Calendly

Calendly is another scheduling tool that allows you to create one-on-one or group booking pages by naming the meeting and choosing the duration, location, and host.

Its Availability feature lets you set your weekly working hours(e.g., Monday through Friday, 9 am to 4 pm). You can also decide how far into the future people can book meetings—for example, up to 60 calendar days with at least 4 hours' notice.

Calendly’s Workflow feature allows you to send email reminders by creating a workflow you can name, choosing the booking page it will apply to, and when it happens(e.g., 24 hours before the event starts). Lastly, the Round Robin meeting lets you choose a group, a host, and even add co-hosts. It also shows each team member's priority, with rankings ranging from highest to lowest.

3. HubSpot Meetings

You can create scheduling pages on Hubspot Meetings by naming your meeting, providing an internal name, choosing an organizer, event title, and location, and adding a description. You can include the “Cancel & reschedule” links in the description.

Under Automations, a Chat Flows feature allows you to create chat flows for your website, mobile, or Facebook Messenger. You can customize your chat widget (colors and font) and availability (e.g., 24/7), create your chat flow (chat heading, user, and welcome message), and install the embed code.

It also sports a Round-robin meeting, which you can create by providing an internal name, choosing an organizer, giving an event title, choosing a location and description, and selecting a booking page.

4. Chili Piper

Chili Piper’s round-robin scheduler lets you choose a booking page, add a welcome message, select the meeting distribution, and choose the meeting participants(assignee, host, and booker). You can control who can access the scheduling link(e.g., Teams).

The User Controls feature lets you define and control user-related scheduling behavior by enabling user availability, which allows bookers to schedule meetings outside of working hours, or enabling busy slots, which allows them to schedule meetings over the busy slots of others.

Round Robin Meeting Use Cases

Various businesses and teams use a round-robin meeting system in their operations. I selected five teams that constantly use it:

• Sales Teams
• Customer Support
• Recruiting
• Consulting Firms and
• Internal Teams

Let’s see how the above-mentioned teams save time, respond faster, and balance workloads among members by using round-robin meetings.

Sales Teams

In sales, once your leads start trickling in, you need to respond quickly. It’s practically impossible for only one team member to handle all leads without getting overwhelmed.

Ray O’Daniel, an entrepreneur, illustrates how round robin works in sales teams.

He gave an example of 10 salespeople working from 9 to 5 every day. When a client books an appointment (for example, at 1:00 PM), the round-robin system assigns the appointment to the next salesperson on your designated list.

Eventually, each salesperson will have a fair share of meetings. Moreover, it’s easier for the manager to train the team and assess close rates, call performance, time-to-close metrics, etc.

In sales, speed and fairness are crucial. Studies indicate that companies that respond quickly after a customer shows interest can win up to 50% of sales.

In a small software company, for instance, new leads can come in every day. Instead of one salesperson getting all the calls while others stay idle, they use a round-robin system.

Once a lead comes in, the system routes it to an available salesperson without much delay.

Customer Support

In customer support spaces, teams often deal with many questions every day. Some are easier to answer by mail, while others are tricky and deserve more attention.

For enterprise customers, for example, you may want to solve their problems through a video call to show dedication and excellent customer service. Customer service agents and managers at SaaS companies understand this clearly.

With a round-robin meeting system, you just need to share your booking page with customers, and once they book a call, the system will assign it to the right agent.

Customer success or onboarding teams also use this system to onboard customers at their preferred time.

Recruiting

Furthermore, round-robin meetings are also important in recruiting processes, as hiring teams often need to schedule dozens of interviews a week. Handling all the interviews by one recruiter will not help for many reasons, such as:

1 . Burnout and overload

• If only one recruiter constantly handles all interviews, they can quickly become tired, leading to stress or fatigue.

It can also affect an interviewer’s ability to assess candidates fairly and accurately.

2 . Scheduling delay

• Candidates may have to wait longer to get interview slots if only one interviewer is available.
• It slows down the hiring process, which can cause companies to lose talent.

As a matter of fact, studies have shown that about 82% of candidates lose interest in a job if the interview process is too long.

Take a look at "FecTech," a tech company that has been struggling due to its hiring process.

At first, all the interviews were done by a single person, and this created frustrations and delays. There were cases where the candidates had to wait for weeks or days before they were interviewed, and hence, some lost interest or got hired by competitors' firms.

After implementing a round-robin system, everything changed. The team was now able to conduct interviews in turns. This spread out the workload and sped up the process.

Consulting Firms

Johannes Nyari from Mastering Consulting once made this statement: “It is very important that you understand that your time is very important for the firm and the client.”

He explained that distributing tasks will reduce the workload and help teams save more time.

I’ll illustrate this with ABCDE Consulting, a firm that works with several startups simultaneously. Each project team has 3 to 4 consultants. To stay efficient, they rotate who leads the client calls.

One week, Consultant A presents progress to a Fintech client, and the following week, Consultant B updates a healthcare startup. The shared responsibility allows each team member to always give their best.

Takeaway

We discussed round-robin meetings in and out. We saw that it’s a system that automatically distributes meetings evenly across employees to ensure a balanced workload.

We also saw how it works and how to set it up in your workflow. You also learned the various departments that use it, such as sales, customer success, and recruitment.

Finally, we covered its benefits and the best round-robing meeting tools.

Now is your turn to implement it for your team. Using a tool like Meetergo, you can set it up in less than 5 minutes and save time by automatically assigning calls to your team members.

Get Started for Free!

FAQs

What is a round-robin meeting?

A Round-robin meeting is a method for distributing meetings evenly across a group to ensure a balanced workload for all members.

How does round-robin scheduling work?

A round-robin scheduling identifies who is available among a group of hosts and automatically schedules the incoming meeting with them.

What industries benefit from round-robin meetings?

Sales, customer support, recruiting, consulting, and internal teams all use round-robin to manage meetings better.

What’s the difference between round-robin and traditional scheduling?

Traditional scheduling often sends meetings to one person. Round-robin rotates them fairly based on who’s available.

How do I set up a round-robin meeting system?

You can set up a round-robin system by using a meeting scheduling software like Meetergo. It will automate rotate meetings among hosts.