MIT Sloan Management Review

Human Resource Management and Industrial Relations, International Business

 

The Science and Fiction of Meetings

By Steven G. Rogelberg, Cliff Scott and John Kello

January 1, 2007

Employees spend increasing amounts of time in meetings and love to complain about them. But privately they see meetings as a productivity tool -- one that companies can learn to use better.

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Meetings are a central fact of organizational life. As a vehicle for communication, they c a n b e ex t re m e l y valuable, providing leaders with a mechanism to disseminate their vision, craft strategic plans and develop responses to the challenges and opportunities impacting their businesses. They can also be helpful for gathering ideas, brainstorming and generating higher levels of employee involvement. Yet as valuable and energizing as good meetings can be, too many meetings are seen as a waste of time — as a source of frustration rather than enlightenment.

Within organizations, meetings play a large role in employee socialization, relationship building and shaping of the culture. Beyond the subject matter at hand, they reinforce formal and informal reporting structures, and provide clues about organizational values and how power is distributed. In terms of cost, no meeting is free. The fully loaded cost of getting a chief executive officer and several vice presidents together for a couple of hours can run into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Ironically, there has been relatively little academic research on meetings in general and what makes the difference between a breakthrough meeting and one that becomes fodder for the comic strip “Dilbert.” So we set out to explore some basic questions: How much time do people really spend in meetings? Are employees burning out... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

 
 

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