I’m going to have to start this piece on work meetings by disclosing my bias. I mostly can’t stand them.
These days, because I work for myself, I’m pretty ruthless about what qualifies for one. If we’re going to have a meeting, I want to know what we’re there to work out. Usually I’ll have a set of questions I want answered or there’ll be a specific problem that genuinely benefits from talking it through.
Once we’ve done that, I’m very happy for everyone to leave. Talking for the sake of talking simply isn’t my thing.
I will admit that sometimes meetings are the best way to get something done. However, what I struggle with is meetings that exist purely because someone thinks we should have a meeting, or if they’re obviously trying to find a way to create forward movement on something by pulling me into it - rather than simply sitting down and thinking things through.
If there’s no real purpose to the conversation, my attention wanders pretty quickly. You’ll probably see me looking at my watch and wondering how soon I can politely escape. You can be sure I’m thinking about other things I need to do instead, and adding very little of value to the discussion.
Working for myself has made me much more conscious of this, because every hour I spend in a meeting is an hour I’m not doing something else. However, back when I worked in corporate roles, I didn’t question it nearly as much. I may not have liked meetings, but I accepted that they were part of the rhythm and infrastructure of corporate life.
The thing is, I know that I’m far from alone in my dislike of excessive meetings. We complained about it a decade ago. People are still complaining about it constantly on social media now.
And yet, we keep having meetings anyway. Don’t you think that’s a little… weird?
Meetings are work you can see
My personal dislike aside, do meetings actually provide the collaboration and productivity boost companies seem to think they do? Well, the jury is out on that one.
One 2022 study of more than 600 employees estimated that companies were investing more than US$80,000 per professional employee each year in meeting time. More than US$25,000 of that was potentially tied up in meetings employees felt they could skip, provided someone kept them informed about what happened. These are estimates rather than direct measures of financial loss, but they give some sense of how much paid working time meetings can consume.
So how did something so resource-intensive become such a dominant way of working?
For starters, meetings are very good at making work visible. I’ve written before about performative work and the tendency some organisations have to confuse visible activity with performance. Meetings fit neatly into that category.
Think about the person with the completely full calendar. They’re in back-to-back meetings and almost impossible to get hold of. They certainly look busy. Meanwhile, someone else has blocked out half the afternoon to solve a difficult problem or create something that requires sustained concentration.
Many companies have always had trouble with measuring and appreciating certain types of knowledge work, simply because it’s harder to observe. You can count how many widgets someone produces on a production line. It’s much harder to assess the value of someone thinking through a problem at any particular moment.
A meeting removes some of that uncertainty because everyone is visibly occupied, yet a full calendar tells you very little about the value someone is creating.
Meetings can also create a sense of progress. There’s a difficult problem, so someone gets everyone together to discuss it. You leave with some actions and feel like something has moved forward. That may be true, or it may be that a group of people just spent an hour talking about the work that still needs to happen afterwards.
There’s safety in deciding together
Meetings provide another psychological function, and it’s related to one of the most basic of human needs - safety. Yes, much of the time it feels safer to make a decision together than to make one alone.
Research into collective decision-making has found that sharing a decision with other people can reduce some of the psychological burden of being personally responsible for its outcome. People can also experience less regret following a group decision than when they make the decision individually.
Anyone who has spent enough time in corporate probably recognises some version of this.
“I’ve decided this is what we’re going to do” feels very different from “We discussed it in the meeting and this is what we agreed.”
In the second version, the decision belongs to the group.
There are obviously good reasons to involve other people in decisions. They may have expertise you need or be directly affected by the outcome. However, in many corporate environments is seems to be the case that collective decision-making becomes the default, rather than the exception.
I’ve been in plenty of meetings where I’ve wondered why so many people were required to make a relatively straightforward decision. Bringing more people into a decision may make it feel safer, while making ownership (and therefore efficiency) less obvious.
When meetings reflect status and hierarchy
Then there’s the question of who has influence once everyone gets into the room.
A major review of around 30 years of meeting science found that hierarchy and status can affect who speaks and whose contributions carry weight. Senior people can dominate airtime, meaning something that looks collaborative can still reproduce the existing power structure of the organisation.
Authority and expertise aren’t necessarily held by the same people. Sometimes the meeting is genuinely collaborative; and sometimes it’s performance theatre around a decision, where the direction of that decisions was largely determined by the hierarchy before everyone arrived in the room.
So why don’t we just cancel them?
No, I’m not advocating for a blanket ban on meetings. They’re genuinely useful for some kinds of work. If you’re dealing with a complicated problem, there can be enormous value in getting the right people into a conversation at the same time.
Real-time communication also gives us information beyond the words themselves. We hear tone and see facial expressions. We can notice confusion or disagreement and respond to it immediately.
However, we need to be cautious when “let’s have a meeting” becomes the default response. That’s when the meeting becomes part of the infrastructure of the organisation, and you have what’s called a “meeting culture”.
If you want an update, you wait for the meeting. If you need a decision, you put it on the agenda. If something changes, you organise another meeting to tell everyone.
In some companies I’ve worked with, a recurring meeting gets into the calendar and can stay there for months or years without anyone seriously questioning whether it still serves a purpose. Eventually, the meeting itself becomes the process.
As an employee, it can be difficult to “solve” a meeting culture, because there are complex social dynamics at play. It’s never as simple as hitting “decline” on that invite for a meeting you really don’t need to be involved in.
In practice, if your manager invited you, you probably go. If everyone else on the leadership team is attending, opting out can send a message you may not want to send. Being invited to an important meeting can itself signal that you’re involved in whatever is happening.
Even when you suspect the meeting isn’t a good use of your time, you still know you need to attend. So attend you do - and there goes another hour.
A simple meeting test
In my own business, I have a simple test for whether or not a meeting is required. I always ask the other person:
What are we actually here to work out? What needs to happen as a result of getting these people together?
It’s also critical to understand the difference between a meeting topic and a meeting purpose. A topic tells you what you’re going to talk about. A purpose tells you what needs to be accomplished by getting everyone together.
“Project update” is a topic. The next question should be: what do we need to work out about the project? Perhaps there’s a problem the team needs to resolve or competing views that need to be discussed. Now you have a reason for a meeting.
“Marketing WIP” is also a topic. If everyone is simply going around the room reporting what they’re working on, that information could probably be shared another way. If there’s something the group needs to work through together, the meeting has a clearer function.
If you need to work through a complicated problem together, a meeting might be exactly the right tool. If you need a decision and the people attending have the information and authority to make it, great.
If you simply need everyone to know something, it’s worth asking whether ten people really need to stop what they’re doing at exactly the same time to receive that information.
Before you book another meeting
The more I’ve looked into this, the less I think our meeting problem is really about meetings. It’s about what we’ve come to rely on them for.
We use meetings to make work visible, move information around an organisation and make decisions feel safer. Over time, those habits become embedded in how a company operates. Then we wonder why telling people to “have fewer meetings” doesn’t make much difference.
You can cancel a recurring meeting. It’s much harder to change the culture that made everyone think they needed it in the first place.
I think it’s always worth coming back to one question: what are we actually meeting to do?
If nobody can explain what the meeting is supposed to accomplish, perhaps the empty space in everyone’s calendar would be more productive.
One thing I’m thinking about this week
Well, that didn’t last long.
Last week, I wrote that I was taking a break from thinking about AI because I’d become exhausted by where the conversation was heading.
Literally minutes after I hit publish, news broke that an OpenAI agent had gained unauthorised access to an Australian Government Medicare statistics portal. The agent had been given a research task involving public medicine spending. When it was denied access to information, the Australian Government says it engaged in “misaligned behaviour” and found another way in. No personal Medicare records were accessed, but the agent did access non-public files.
So much for my resolution to not think or talk about AI for a while.
This week I’ve been thinking again about the question of AI’s social licence.
For the first few years of generative AI, I approached the technology with a sense of cautious optimism. I didn’t love the idea of it, but it was here and advancing quickly, so the sensible response seemed to be to understand it and work out how to use it responsibly.
My position has changed considerably over time. I’m no longer convinced adoption should be the default while we work out the consequences afterwards.
There’s a growing trust problem here. People are worried about what AI means for their jobs. Creatives are fighting over copyright and the use of their work. There are legitimate concerns about environmental impact and what increasingly autonomous systems mean for cybersecurity.
The Medicare incident adds another dimension, because the agent apparently crossed a boundary it hadn’t been instructed to cross. The Australian Government has described the incident as serious, even though its impact was relatively minor.
From where I’m sitting, impact is irrelevant. We shouldn’t have to wait for something catastrophic to happen before asking where responsibility sits when increasingly autonomous systems behave in ways their developers didn’t intend.
If AI companies want society to accept more powerful and autonomous systems, I think the burden increasingly sits with them to demonstrate that those systems deserve that trust - or accept heavy regulation or a moratorium.
Technological capability alone doesn’t create social licence. AI now needs to earn it.
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