Do We Really Need Another Meeting? The Science of Workplace Meetings - Joseph E. Mroz, Joseph A. Allen, Dana C. Verhoeven, Marissa L. Shuffler, Current Directions in Psychological Science

This resource first appeared in issue #67 on 26 Mar 2021 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Meetings

As a manager, one of our responsibilities is to keep people aligned and disseminate information. One (one!) tool available to us are meetings, which can be extremely efficient when run well and continually improved; but ugh, how many meetings have we gone to that aren’t that way?

We actually know a lot about meetings, what works and what doesn’t. Mroz et al. cover and summarize a lot of the literature. It’s a review article, so it’s hard to usefully summarize. I think it’s worth calling out a few specific things, like some purposes of meetings (it’s very hard to run a good meeting without being very clear about what the purpose is):

Share information - these can often but not always be made asynchronous
Solve problems & make decisions - lots of value to having at least the final stages of this be synchronous
Develop and implement an organizational strategy - this is a little specific, I’d reframe it as “alignment”; not just sharing information but getting everyone on the same page and committed to a direction
Debrief a team after a performance episode - a retrospective, or after-incident review, or hotwash

They also usefully highlight known facts about necessary meeting preparation steps and separate leader and attendee responsibilities - arriving on time, following an agenda, make sure attendees are participating, intervene when necessary, send out meeting minutes and action items immediately after, and revisit meeting structure and find out from team members whether they’re happy with the meetings as run.

Most of these points won’t be surprised to people who care enough about managing teams to subscribe to a newsletter on the topic, but it’s still a good short read and emphasizes something that might not be obvious - these aren’t just rules of thumb, people have been studying meetings since at least 1986 and we know what does and doesn’t work well