The science of meetings: leaders should talk less in meetings

Executives spend nearly three quarters of their working time in meetings. A review of more than 30 years of research shows which changes in running meetings improve their outcomes.

A review of more than three decades of meeting research appeared in this year's edition of the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior. Its authors are Liana Kreamer of the Florida Institute of Technology and Steven Rogelberg and Jon Gray of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Kreamer emphasizes that the chair should guide the discussion but not dominate it, and should also keep track of how much of the time they themselves take up in order to give others a chance to speak. The research was described in October by Knowable Magazine, followed by Ars Technica (opens in a new tab).

Nearly a billion meetings take place worldwide every day. Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock of the University of Hamburg points out that leaders often talk the most and therefore rate their meetings more positively than participants do. Her studies of video recordings showed that attentive follow-up questioning by the leader improves team performance. Questions asked without listening to the answers do not have this effect.

Practices that researchers identify as effective:

• inviting only the people who need to be present, with an agenda and a clear purpose,
• a few minutes of informal conversation at the beginning, which helps introverted people speak up,
• written brainstorming (brainwriting) in a shared document or chat, more effective in a 2009 study than the traditional approach,
• avoiding times right after lunch, when energy drops,
• sending out a task list after the meeting and assessing its effectiveness.

Ava Scott of the University of Copenhagen, who studies Microsoft employees, found that recurring meetings are the most pointless. In January 2023, Shopify removed nearly 10,000 recurring meetings involving three or more people from calendars.

A different picture emerges from a working paper published in September by the American National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER (opens in a new tab)) by David Deming's team at Harvard. According to data on more than 9,000 employees in Norway, meetings account on average for 12 percent of working hours and 14 percent of the wage bill, and a higher number of meetings is associated with later wage growth and learning on the job. The study is correlational and has not yet undergone peer review, so it does not prove that meetings cause pay rises.

A manager can implement most of the practices described in their own meetings without additional tools or costs.