Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article published with permission from Knowledge@Wharton, the online research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
They interrupt flow. They tend to convey all of the information you already knew and none of the things you really wanted to know. Meetings have emerged as one of the most universally despised conventions of American work life, and they show no sign of letting up.
But if workers and managers alike feel put upon by meetings, experts say it's not meetings per se that are the culprit. The problem is bad meetings.
"When people are attending bad meetings and that is the pattern, they either check out or they act out," organizational psychologist Roger Schwarz, president and CEO of Roger Schwarz & Associates, says. "By checking out they may be physically there but not engaged and contributing."
Meetings remain critical because business has become more complex and employees work more interdependently. Says Wharton management professor Nancy Rothbard, "There are so many demands on us that leaders are scheduling meetings to get people engaged in the problem at hand."
Yet what might be adding to greater meeting misery today are the dual — and perhaps interrelated — factors of time and technology. There is a general perception of a speed-up in the workplace; that workers are just busier, and that tools like e-mail, Google Docs and instant messaging can get the job done more quickly and efficiently than meetings
"People are generally working longer hours and they've got more demands on them, and they are being expected to multitask," says Mr. Schwarz. "And so people look at meetings with an eye toward, 'Is this is a good use of my time?'"
Recommendations for improving meetings include defining the purpose of each meeting, having everyone attending prepare in advance, and sending out an agenda in advance. Another suggestion was having different types of meetings with different objectives, such as the once-a-day, short meeting to catch up on any pending matters, longer staff meetings exploring key objectives and recent progress, and much longer meetings around strategy.
Wharton management professor Matthew Bidwell says that meetings can feel burdensome, "because they don't feel like proper work," but in fact, they are. "The rationale is coordination, which is a function of organization, to bring together a lot of different people who do a lot of different things. Rules are one way of achieving coordination, but the more complex the issue, the more you have to sit down and work through things. Face-to-face you get the richest communication — you read body language, you learn much more and faster."